Organizational Conceits: Embedded And Marked Symbolism

The idea of "symbolism" in anthropological studies has become so extended that it is little more than an invitation to view anything in the life of a community in a certain way. A symbol in this view is "any structure of signification in which a direct, primary meaning designates, in addition, another meaning which is indirect, secondary and figurative, and which can be apprehended only through the first" (Ricoeur 1980, 245), in short, in one or another context, potentially everything.

It is useful for comparative purposes—and particularly for emphasizing an important difference between places such as Piri and places such as Bhaktapur—to distinguish two different kinds or aspects of symbol or symbolism, "embedded" and "marked." The term "embedded" implies "indirect, secondary, and figurative meanings" that are condensed and dissolved in any culturally perceived object or event so that they seem to belong to the object or event as aspects or dimensions of its "natural" meaning. Examples of such culturally shaped embedded and naturalized symbolic forms are the Hindu and Bhaktapurian complex of purity, impurity, contamination, purification, and the like, which are the subject of chapter 11. "Embedded symbolism" is associated with the cultural structuring of "common sense," the structuring of the assumptions, categorizations, and phrasings through which processes of cognition themselves are structured and through which meaning is created and selected out of the flow of stimuli generated and experienced within a community. Such culturally constructed perceptions and understanding have the experiential characteristics of "ordinary

reality." They are no more (or less) questionable than any other sensations or perceptions, and the knowledge associated with them is felt to be directly derived from sensations and perceptions. Beliefs derived from or composing such knowledge are generally directly held with no epistemological problems. Faith is not at issue.

The "symbolism" of concern to recent "symbolic anthropology" has been, to considerable degree, such "embedded" symbolism.^[8] However, the kind of symbolism that is strikingly elaborated in Bhaktapur is of the sort to which statements about "symbols" in ordinary discourse refer—something whose meaning must evidently be sought elsewhere than in what the object or event seems to mean "in itself." "Marked" symbols, in contrast to "embedded" symbols, are objects or events that use some device to call attention to themselves and to set themselves off as being extraordinary, as not belonging to—or as being something more than—the ordinary banal world. This is the symbolism of various attention-attracting, emotionally compelling kinds of human communication, whether it be art, drama, religion, magic, myth, legend, recounted dream, and so forth, which are marked in some way to call attention to themeselves as being special, as being other than ordinary reality. Most of this volume, beginning with chapter 7, is concerned with such marked symbolism and its special spaces, practitioners, messages, resources, and functions in the life of the city.