Raymond Firth - Symbols: Public and Private

This book first published in 1973 offers a broad survey of the study of symbolic ideas and behaviour.

The study of symbolism is popular nowadays and anthropologists have made substantial contributions to it. Raymond Firth has long been internationally known for his field research in the Solomons and Malaysia, and for his theoretical work on kinship, economics and religion. Here from a new angle, he has produced a broad survey of the study of symbolic ideas and behaviour.

Professor Firth examines definitions of symbol. He traces the history' of scientific inquiry into the symbolism of religious cults, mythology ant! dreams back into the eighteenth century. He compares .some modem approaches 10 symbolism in art. literature and philosophy with those in social anthropology. He then cites examples in anthropological treatment of symbolic material from cultures of varying sophistication. Finally he oilers dispassionate analyses of symbols used in contemporary Western situations - from hair-styles to the use and abuse of national Hags; from cults of Black Jesus to the Euchvistic rite. In all this Professor Firth combines social and political topicality with a scholarly and provocative theoretical inquiry.

Raymond Firth

First published 1973
by George Allen & Unwin Ltd

This edition first published in 2011 by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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1973 George Allen & Unwin Ltd

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A Library of Congress record exists under ISBN: 0045730113

ISBN: 978-0-415-69466-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-14546-3 (ebk)

We, the Tikopia
Social Change in Tikopia
Tikopia Ritual and Belief
Rank and Religion in Tikopia
(George Allen & Unwin)

Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori
(Wellington Government Printer)

Elements of Social Organization
(Tavistock Publications)

Primitive Polynesian Economy
(Routledge)

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
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First published in 1973

This book is copyright under ihe Berne Convention. All rights are reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers.

George Allen & Unwin Ltd 1973

ISBN 0 04 573011 3

This edition not for sale in the U.S.A., their dependencies or the Philippine Republic.

Printed in Great Britain
in 12 pt Founder type by
Alden & Mowbray Ltd
at the Aldea Press, Oxford

My anthropological interest in symbolism was aroused more than forty years ago, among the Tikopia people of Western Polynesia. Their pagan rituals embodied many symbolic actions and symbolic statements of a vivid and complex kind, and interesting questions were presented as they converted from paganism to Christianity. But my earlier attraction to Romanesque art already bore on the problem of relation between religious symbolism and structure of society in a pre-industrial phase.

The aim of this book is to help to give perspective to the anthropological study of symbolic forms and processes and the functions of symbolism. It is meant neither as a textbook nor as a comprehensive general work. I have written about a range of ideas and material that seem relevant to me in understanding the problems of symbolism, and in what I have said of symbolism in art, literature, and religion I have no specialist knowledge. As well as giving some review of the present state of knowledge in anthropological studies of symbolism, I have tried to do three things. To provide some time-dimension, I have examined some of the ideas on symbolism put forward at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century by mythologists, dream-philosophers, cult-analysts some of whom might be described as proto-anthropolo-gists and I have continued the study as anthropological interest crystallized until the present day. To provide breadth I have brought into discussion of the nature of symbolism hints of a few selected contributions from other fields of knowledge, including philosophy, since I think anthropologists need to be more aware of the depth of such studies in symbolism. Thirdly, I have deliberately cited exam-ples of symbolic behaviour and statements about symbols, taken from newspapers and other ephemeral sources, because to my mind they show something of the richness of material open for investiga-tion in modern industrial society.

In all this, while not, as I have once been labelled, an unqualified empiricist, I have been very aware of the problem of evidence. I think speculative reasoning in anthropology is stimulating and necessary for the development of theory, but it is easy in the study of symbolism to let it pass for fact. In anthropology, our imagination will have to be welded to honest craftsmanship if in the long run it is to carry conviction.

In 1967, as the guest of Victoria University, New Zealand, I delivered the Chancellor's Lectures, beginning with Giving and Getting, in which I put forward some of the ideas in this book. When I was asked to become Sara H. Schaffner Lecturer at the University of Chicago for the Fall Quarter of 1970,1 was stimulated to expand those themes in the direction of specific studies of symbolism, which seemed appropriate in view of the very lively interest in symbolism in the Department of Anthropology there. By the generous terms of the Lectureship, which was instituted by Mr Joseph Halle Schaffner in honour of his mother, the University was asked to give the lecturer such hospitality as would provide him with a free informal atmosphere in which to work and mingle with all members of all grades of the academic community. I am very grateful to the University authorities, and especially to Bernard S. Cohn, Chairman of the Anthropology Department, and my other colleagues there, for all the help and hospitality they gave me then and later.

I have since added to the Schaffner Lectures, and have presented parts of this book at various stages to audiences at Cornell, Case Western Reserve, Columbia, McGill, Princeton, the London School of Economics, the University of Hawaii, the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I mention in particular also that a version of material on the symbolism of exchange was given as the Dr David B. Stout Memorial Lecture before the Undergraduate Anthropology Club of the State University of New York at Buffalo, in April 1970. From discussions arising from these lectures and seminars I have profited much, and am grateful for the warmth of my reception on these occasions. A substantial part of the material and general argument of Chapter 9 has appeared in another form as a contribution to a volume of essays in honour of my colleague Audrey Richards