Ethnographic Semantics: A Preliminary Survey [and Comments and Replies]

Ethnographic semantics is the description of semantic characteristics that are culturally revealing. In anthropology it has come to include a number of different types of analysis which have so far been used mostly in studies of kinship and folk science. These are contrast-level mapping, componential analysis, programmed specification, and various uses of semantic rules, notably reduction analysis. Contrast-level study is the mapping of native words in hierarchies of different levels of generality. Componential analysis is the breakdown of terms into the distinctive features that are necessary and sufficient to distinguish them from each other. Programmed specification is a carefully controlled use of native phrases and statements to elicit further native statements about a given topic in a way that preserves as much of the native thought pattern as possible. The use of semantic rules permits one to "generate" statements that are acceptable to native speakers or allows the reduction of a series of terms or phrases to a focal type or to semantic primitives in ways that are theoretically productive of further semantic and ethnologic insight. In working with semantics, the anthropologists should not preoccupy himself problems of homonyny, which are sterile in the absence of informant validation and written records of the language. Culturally based validation through experimental semantics, with careful attention to the various ways in which thought and meaning interrelate and how they "come throught" in translation, will reduce arbitrariness. The treatment of semantic problems by philosophers (e.g., Quine's principle of the indeterminacy of translation and the Quine-Carnap controversy over intensional meaning) can be illuminating to the anthropologist in this respect. With the beginning of the 1960's, I feel that social anthropology has entered a new phase of development. Higher standards of excellence are being brought to bear in ethnographic descriptions, and semantics has come to occupy a larger place in them. The greatest emphasis now seems to be on ethnographic semantics-the semantic description of the communicative codes of a particular speech community. As more investigators become interested in general ethnology, however, there should be an increasing interest in ethnologic semantics, which deals with the theoretical vocabulary and symbolic manipulations of ethnology, and area which remains undeveloped.