So I propose here to consider some examples of these phenomena as a semiotician of discourse to see what they reveal. Events of discourse, including both the verbal and the otherwise (e.g., Maussian cycles of interagent prestation-counter-prestation- …), manifest whatever is specific to the sociocultural order of phenomena, whatever of other orders may also be involved, such as human organismal psycho-biology. I would suggest that the proper question is “ Where is culture?” And, in the nature of matters cultural-note my substitution of the adjective-the “where” question can only be answered by exploring the semiotics of discourse, which, in the widest sense, including language-in-use as well as other modes of semiosis, is the way culture presents itself to humanity. What is important to note is that all of their writers and those since have been trying to answer the question of what “culture” is. We need not review Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s several hundred definitions and characterizations of “culture” down to 1952, nor even those of the sixty years since. Our “living ancestors” by then at the fringes of imperial enterprises, no less than our civilizational ancestors as revealed by comparative philology, could be seen to evidence “culture” in the general sense, just as the particulars carefully segregated and labeled by provenance and provenience were the empirical evidence for the existence of particular cultures in the plural (see Stocking 1987 Silverstein 2005b). Indeed, in those heady days of social evolutionary explanation illuminated by Darwinian light, it was the collectanea of travelers’ and missionaries’ reports, of philologically worked-over texts, and especially of artifacts-things-displayable in museum cases that constituted the evidence to be examined, classified along relevant dimensions from simple to complex, allowing typology to be converted to diachrony. Talk about kitchen sinks! Even the subtitle of Tylor’s book is enumerative: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. ![]() Tylor’s introductory sentence is the very first among those quoted in their section on “enumeratively descriptive” definitions, as they cosmetically term the type: “Culture, or civilization, … is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” ( 1871, 1.1). ![]() Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn begin their “critical review of concepts and definitions” of “culture” in 1952. Tylor in his book Primitive Culture, with which Alfred L. ![]() At my urging, a poster announcing this as a talk included a little conceptual-art joke by using a background photograph of a “kitchen sink.” The intent was interdiscursively to index-to point to-the famous 1871 characterization by Sir Edward B.
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