Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Introduction
History is culturally ordered, differently so in different societies, according to meaningful schemes of things. The converse is also true: cultural schemes are historically ordered, since to a greater or lesser extent the meanings are revalued as they are practically enacted.
For on the one hand, people organize their projects and give significance to their obiects from the existing understandings of the cultural order.
To that extent, the culture is historically reproduced in actlon.
On the other hand, then, as the contingent circumstances of action need not conform to the significance some group might assign them, people are known to creatively reconsider their conventional schemes.
And to that extent, the culture is historically altered in action.
They may be summed up in the assertion that what anthropologists call "structure" - the symbolic relations of cultural order - is an historical object.
The assertion explicitly overrides the notional opposition, found everywhere in the human sciences, between "structure" P vii
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History is
P xi made the same general way within a given society as it is between societies.
The bigger issue, as I see it in these essays, is the dual existing and interaction between the cultural order as constituted in the society and as lived by the people: structure in convention and in action, as virtual and as actual.
To the extent that the symbolic is thus the pragmatic, the system is a synthesis in time of reproduction and variation.
If culture is as anthropologists claim a meaningful order, still, in action meanings are always at risk.
Culture is therefore a gamble placed with nature, in the course of which, wittingly or unwittingly- I paraphrase Marc Bloch- the old names are still on everyone's lips acquire connotations that are far removed from their original meaning.
This is one of the historical processes I will be calling "the functional revaluation of the categories."
The sense of a sign (the Saussurean "value") is determined by its contrastive relations to other signs of the system.
Therefore, it is complete and systematic only in the society (or community of speakers) as a whole.
Any actual use of the sign in reference by some person or some person or group engages only part, some small fraction, of the collective sense.
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Acting from different perspectives, and with different social powers of objectifying their respective interpretations, people come to different conclusions and societies work out different consensuses.
The effects of such risks can be radical innovations.
For finally, in the contradictory encounters with persons and things, signs are liable to be reclaimed by the original powers of their creation: the human symbolic consciousness.
Hence the empirical is not known simply as such but as a cultufally relevant significance, and the old system is projected torward in its novel forms.
It also follows that different cultural orders have their own, distinctive modes of historical production.
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