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Meaning, Sharing, CultureSS51000 (SS51@NEMOMUS.BITNET)Thu, 4 Apr 1996 17:47:07 CST
of culture's constitution is provocative and a bit shocking--even to so staunch a materialist as I. I think if we were to try this, it would need to be on better grounds than the assertion that meaning is totally idiosyncratic; surely R. Kephart's linguistic example--and the fact that symbolic communication occurs at all--effectively refute this claim. My next thought was that it would be good if we had some decent method for measuring the degree of "sharedess" of meaning. Sherry Orner's classic paper on "Key Symbols" points out that some symbols, such as the U.S. flag, seem to have intrinsically vague, diffuse meaning--I believe she termed these "summarizing symbols." Would this entail lower sharedness--i.e., greater idiosyncracy--of meaning among individuals in the population, by comparison to other kinds of symbols? Oddly, though, I'm not sure it would do us much good to have such measurement. After all, we have rather good data about the degree of sharedness of artifacts and behaviors, e.g., the proportion of the US population that owns a car or has participated in a marriage ritual. Many people own ca rs, and nobody exactly owns, say, a space shuttle; many go through a mar riage rite and almost none of us are inaugurated President; but cars, space shuttles, marriages, and presidential inuagurations all seem to be describable, equally well, as features of US culture. Perhaps we are dealing with different senses of "sharing" here; but these considerations seem to show that knowing how common or frequent something is within a population is not necessarily crucial in determining whether we want to consider it a feature of culture. Still, I'd like to hear more from Matt --or others--about conceptualizing culture without reference to shared meanings. --Bob Graber
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