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GABRIELA-MARIANA LUCA

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Editura „Victor Babeş”

Piaţa Eftimie Murgu 2, cam. 316, 300041 Timişoara Tel./ Fax 0256 495 210

e-mail: [email protected] www.umft.ro/editura

Director general: Prof. univ. emerit dr. Dan V. Poenaru

Colecţia: HIPPOCRATE

Coordonator colecţie: Prof. univ. dr. Andrei Motoc Referent ştiinţific: Prof. univ. dr. Maria Puiu

Traduceri şi referent pentru limba engleză: Carmen Tărniceru

© 2020 Toate drepturile asupra acestei ediţii sunt rezervate.

Reproducerea parţială sau integrală a textului, pe orice suport, fără acordul scris al autorilor este interzisă şi se va sancţiona conform legilor în vigoare.

ISBN 978-606-786-206-5

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Gabriela Luca uses her double training as a linguist and anthropologist to realize, again, a wonderful and deep academic plea for communication, in a subtle dialogue between science and religion, much useful to the future servant in obtaining and maintaining the health of our fellow men. This elegant editorial issue is a new challenge both for medical students and for the general knowledge of each and any of us.

I am glad to be among the first to benefit from this wonderful work, which I strongly recommend!

Maria Puiu

MD, PHD, Discipline of Genetics Victor Babes University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Timisoara

Gabriela-Mariana Luca's Introduction to Cultural Anthropology of the Human Body is a significant contribution to the field and a profound research and considered a gateway to the people approaching the field as future study or general interest. Based on observable, sharable examples and on many years of research and teaching, the book, without mystifying or over-generalizing, demonstrates its author’s deep understanding individual and societal traits, currents, ambiguities and diversity.

Slobodan Dan Paich Director and Principal Researcher, Artship Foundation, San Francisco Visiting Professor, Anthropology-Cultural Studies, UMFTVB

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Table of contents

Part I

An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology ... 5

Historical Conditions which Led to the Emergence of Anthropology ... 6

Conceptual values ... 8

Anthropology, Sociology, Religion ... 13

The Methodologic Field of Cultural Anthropology ... 16

Currents in Anthropology and Schools ... 18

Codes and Signs ... 23

Oral and Written ... 25

Figures and Images ... 29

Nature of Symbol ... 32

Culture and Survival: Myths and Rites ... 36

Race. Concept and Determination ... 40

Ancestors – The Mirror World ... 45

Acculturation ... 63

Part II The human body ... 65

Sociocultural morphemes ... 66

The human body, a sum of anthropological introductions ... 70

Body marks ... 76

Fetishism ... 84

The body in motion ... 89

Elements of mythological anatomy ... 91

Sememe, sign and signification in an anthropological discourse ... 102

The tooth, very briefly, from totem to implant ... 109

I and the other; between us, the face ... 113

Signs on the face, meanings and time ... 124

Bibliography ... 132

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Part I

An Introduction to Cultural

Anthropology

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Historical Conditions which Led to the Emergence of Anthropology

Anthropology considered too many times synonymous to ethnology1 emerged, some may say, approximately one century and a half ago, as a result of the contact to non-European communities, during the period right before the Industrial Revolution. Occidental Europe was about to become more and more controlled by capitalism and to undergo, more intense than ever, the effervescence of substantial changes. The Congress of Berlin in 18852 practically marks the emergence of exotic ethnology. Its purpose was going to be to study the populations found

1 Although according to contemporary British researchers, this synonymy is almost perfect, there are some differences in the semantic field and even methodological differences between anthropology and ethnology. Anthropology, the study of man – of humanity, in its effort to draft general results on the diversity of people and their environment, is divided into two main branches, cultural anthropology and physical anthropology. The latter studies the body of man, following the line of evolution and the types of development of the individual from the perspective of biological variations from within the species. Cultural anthropology studies man from cultural perspective, the representative feature of the human species, the only one able to see the world symbolically, the life of societies, its transformation based on such symbols, identified and explained by archeologists, linguists and ethnologists.

2Known and Congo-conference, the meeting took place starting in November 1884, and continued up to 1885; the ministries of exterior of 14 strong European countries and the United States, called by the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, decided altogether to politically divide the black continent. The departure point for dividing Africa seems to be the year 1882, when Egypt was occupied by the Great Britain. France, dissatisfied as it had financed the Suez Channel, focuses its political ambitions to the West (it wanted at the time a West-African empire). Tunis became French colony, Belgium interrupts the French momentum, interferes and proclaims the free state of Congo. The Ivory Coast goes to France, the UK allies with Portugal and recognizes its rights to the Congo river estuaries. Otto von Bismarck conquers Togoland and other two territories, now known as Cameroon. The situation was more and more complicated, other European powers would get involved as well. The Conference from Berlin offered the “possibility” of strong European countries to announce that a territory in Africa was under “effective occupation”.

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outside the old continent, the study of the customs, traditions, lifestyle, in order for the Europeans to gather the richness of such people, the abolition of their culture and to convert them to the European values.

Once more, in history, we get to be acknowledged that difference is exotic per se, and that the discovery of the other nurtures the logics of otherness, a basic concept of cultural anthropology, a part of the self, the mirror the outsider represents:

“The other, either presented as a Persian, Egyptian, Scythian, Arabic, Berber, African, Indian, or imagined before having been met, is presented in two essential operating values: distance related to the level of geographical and cartographic knowledge on the one hand, and to the practice of curiousness and sight, on the other hand, of miraculous, in two fundamental valences: the monstrous on the one hand, kindness and paradisiac beauty, on the other hand. This double analytical approach of otherness will strengthen the emblematic symbols for the Other to be perceived and conceived; to know that it is always exotic as it comes from a place unknown by definition and that, once discovered, it becomes the carrier of the traditional functions of such place, the model.” (Affergan, 1987: 27)

Its emergence certificate however had been actually filled in from the oldest times. The human being as a problem of the human being seems to have been an issue since the Upper Paleolithic. Some thousands years later, the four great races3 of humanity will be represented on the tomb of the Pharaohs in Biban-el-Moluk, and we actually owe Aristotle (who has placed for the first time the human being amongst the other animals in Historia Animalium) the rise of the term anthropology.

3 According to the beliefs of the time: the white race was represented by Libyans and painted in white, the black race in its specific color, the Asians painted in yellow, the Egyptians in red. Around 1400 B.C., the Egyptians start the first expeditions to the upper stream of Nile. We owe them the first descriptions of the populations in Sudan and of the pygmies in Central Africa.

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Conceptual values

The term ethnology was used for the first time in 1787 by the Swiss Chavanne4 and used during the period by other scholars of the times. Back then, its meaning was a synonymous to the science dealing with classifying the human races, science which subsequently became a branch of physical anthropology. Extensively, it shall be used after 1810 - 1830 in France, and will define the subject that deals with the study of people, groups, ethnic pluralities in general, but also the culture and customs of the people considered primitive.

Ethnology studies the laws of a group of individuals composed on a distinct cultural basis. It is the science studying the evolution of humans depending on the historical traditions of the group, the transformations of its language, the customs, religion, physical features (presently, abandoned idea due as well to the contemporary multi-ethnic societies but also to the restricted particularities of the race concept) and psychic features. Much later, the term will be replaced by anthropology.

Cultural and social anthropology emerges as a standalone science between 1965 and 1970, although it has had quite deep roots in history5. Many philosophers, after the war, idealistically embracing the Marxist- Leninist thinking, with a firm faith in the freedom struggle of people,

4 « Essai sur l’éducation intellectuelle avec le profit d’une science nouvelle » François Gresle, Michel Panoff, Michel Perrin, Pierre Tripier, Dictionnaire des sciences humaines, édit. Nathan, 1990, p 112.

5 We discern, historically speaking, the following steps of knowledge which led to the sedimentation of anthropology as science: 1. The ancient period, almost exclusively represented by the Greek thinkers: Herodotus, Ctesiasis of Cnide, Pausanias. 2. The medieval period represented by the great travelers and thinkers: Marco Polo, Du Plan de Carpin, Ibn Batuta, Jourdain de Séverac etc. 3. The end of the 15th century and the whole 16th century: the stories on travels to and from America. 4. The 17th century and Bacon’s contribution to organizing the research. 5. The Illuminist age brilliantly represented by:

Lafitau, Buffon, Linné. 6. Modern anthropology: by Boas, Taylor, Lévi-Strauss and their continuators.

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become ethnologists of the French state in colonies. “According to them, the ideologic function of ethnic separations scholarly supported by the dominant classes of industrial societies might be that it hides the convergent interests of the exploited parts of the population and even to hide certain forms of claims, making them look like the manifestation of archaic burden” (Formoso, 2002:20). The direct contact with the evil generated by the Imperialists, the careful study of such societies will make them rise both against the colonization policy and against the initial concept of ethnology which defined them as primitive societies, and which used to actually pursue to ease colonization. The revolt led as well to the change of the professional title. They became anthropologists6. Starting with the Norwegian researcher, F. Barthes7, we have been witnesses of an approach focused on the interethnic relations which mix up social psychology, represented by Goffman, to systemic ecology.

Barth says that interethnic frontiers can be quite permeable, without it prejudicing the integrity of the groups in contact and, more than that, that ethnic groups do not have an isolate existence. The generous field of anthropology will become the scene of more and more harsh theoretical fights, the religious and the political being the main topics settlement of which, if crossed the emotional fervor and the symbolism characterizing them, they all hoped to lead to the good understanding of societies, synthesis of which may be: “integrated in the symbolic, our politic is integrated as well in the field of relativeness”. Robert Lowie8, Evans- Pritchard9, Edmund Leach10, Georges Balandier11, Alfred Adler12, David

6 Gr. Anthropos = man, gr. logos =science

7 Ethnic groups and boundaries. The social organization of culture difference, Oslo:

Universitetsforlaget, 1969

8 Psychology and Anthropology of Races, (1923), Primitive Religion, (1924), The Origin of the State, (1927), History of Ethnological Theory, (1937), Social Organization, (1948)

9 1937 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford University Press.

1976, 1940, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940b "The Nuer of the Southern Sudan" in African Political Systems. M. Fortes and E.E. Evans-Prtitchard, eds., London: Oxford University Press, 1965 Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford University Press

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Kertzer13 are just a part of the artisans of a firm methodology, testimony of the fact that the political anthropology of faraway lands is followed these days by a political anthropology of the space in close proximity, integrated in its history.

Anthropology studies the man and the group it is part of as well as the behavior patterns and variations emerged inside the group. Its purpose is to explain and understand the social reality of the group.

The term is often related to that of ethnography; however, we need to underline that the latter regards the material culture of people and allows the observation of the way of life and the collection of historical data.

The concept of culture14 emerges in anthropology towards the end of the 19th century. The first full definition belongs to the English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor who wrote in 1871: culture 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. Culture is human nature per se. The term has only been updated and reinvested new meanings. “During this travel around

10 Political systems of highland Burma: A study of Kachin social structure (1954).

Harvard University, Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols are Connected (1976). Cambridge University Press, Social Anthropology (1982). Oxford University Press.

11 Anthropologie politique, 1967, Le pouvoir sur scènes, 1980.

12 Meaning of Life (Der Sinn des Lebens), translated in Romanian by Leonard Gavriliu

13 Ritual. Politics and Power, New Haven, Zale University Press

14 One of the most important theoreticians of the concept, Norbert Elias writes in the Process of Civilizing: “The French and English concept of civilization can regard political or economic, religious or technical, moral or social facts. The german concept of Kultur regards in essence spiritual, artistic, religious facts, having a tendency to netly delimit the facts of such type, on the one hand, from the political, economic and social facts, on the other hand. The French and English concept of civilization can regard fulfilments, but equally regards attitude, that behaviour of people, irrespective if they fulfilled something or not. In return, the German concept Kultur has attenuated the reporting to behaviour to the values of a man without having fulfilled anything, by its simple being and by his conduct, and the specific German meaning of the concept Kultur is expressed in the purest meaning by its derivate, the adjective kulturell, which does not show the existential values of man, but the value and character of certain human products”. (2002:50)

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Europe, the new word, civilization, has been accompanied by an old word – culture – (Cicero had already said it: Cultura animi philosophia est), which has been rejuvenated in order to get almost the same meaning to civilization. For some time, culture will only be the dubbing of civilization” (Braudel, 1994: 35). With time, the notation proliferated and, there were, at the end of the 20th century more than one hundred definitions of culture (Kroeber and Kluckhohn). Present day anthropo- logists have been striving to get a much firmer delimitation between the human behavior pattern and the abstract values generating it on the one hand, and the perception of the world as generated by the sum of the beliefs underneath this behavior on the other hand. In other words, culture is not only observing a type of behavior, but rather observing the beliefs and values people use to explain and motivate experience, which was reflected precisely by their behavior. A current sense of culture may define it as a set of rules respected by the members of a group, which lead to a certain type of behavior and which establish the order taken by each and every member in such defined group, rules considered appropriate and acceptable for everyone. The compared study of various cultures allowed anthropologists to set certain basic features, present in all societies. Culture is the common denominator by which a group member makes its point and gets to be understood by all the other members.

Anthropologist Leslie A. White15 insists upon the fact that any human behavior has its origin in the way to use symbols. Art, religion and money, White exemplifies, imply the use of symbols. Images, objects, gestures are carrying symbols. Language, as substitute of objects, is the most important symbol carrier of any culture. By word, man manages to transmit its ideational inheritance to a new generation. We may say that the cultural fact is to be learned, transmitted, hereditary. We learn a culture when brought up from within. The process a culture is transmitted by from one generation to the next is called enculturation. Our biological needs (hunger, thirst, sleep, sex etc.) are similar to those of other animals, the ways they are satisfied by the human being are cultural products. Not any behavior learnt is culture. An animal can be trained, by repeated exercises, to make certain things. They will not be however naturally transmitted to future generations. Adaptation to the environment is for a human being a cultural act: resistance to the environmental conditions

15 L. White, 1900-1975, one of the most important theoreticians of North American anthropology, commented that the notion of culture supports on three essential components: technical-economic, social, ideological.

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assumes, besides biological “adjustments”, a whole series of facts: tools, cloths, habitations etc. A culture cannot survive unless it really settles the basic issues of the group. They need to procure and distribute goods and services considered indispensable to life, to keep up social order, to be transmitted to future generations. Synthetizing, we can say that the main function of culture is to unite and motivate all the members of the group to survive, engaged in all the processes and actions needed for survival.

Cultural anthropology, emerged in the United States along Franz Boas, is a specific step within a much broader subject. It is connected to cultural relativism, part of the technique, objects, behavior features, a synthesis of social activity. Anthropology, the science of civilizations, is, as M.J. Herskovitz16 said in his paper, Man and his Works, the science of man and of his works.

16 American anthropologist convinced by the influence of the African culture on the American culture, Man and his works: the science of cultural anthropology, 1964

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Anthropology, Sociology, Religion

Anthropology is the science of man as sociology is the science of society.

Society is represented by a group of people with a clearly defined place and sharing the same cultural traditions. The way such people depend on one another reflects in the economical system and their family relations. The group identity, which keeps society together, is known as social structure.

Anthropology and sociology have the same purpose, they both study the assembly of material and spiritual culture of the man, except that ethnology is also the science of exotic, nonindustrial societies, fewer and fewer, and amongst these, some have no form of writing. Sociology, born approximately in the same period, has been from the very beginning stimulated by the industrial development and by the huge transformations of the society, generated by it.

The major difference between the two subjects is given by the research perspectives and methods. The first deals with a limited group, the second, with a global perspective, starts from particular actions and tries to set laws which lead to generalization, applicable to all individuals.

The tools operated by the two subjects can be similar, but sociology starts in research from already existent hypotheses based on the institutionalized preconstructions and looks to check them, by accepting or refusing them, by investigations on field. Anthropology, as well, uses the field as basis of research, but the questionnaire is built differently from that sociological as the central element is the man and, therefore, gets different answers. IN other words, sociology studies various societies before studying the individual, interested especially by the formation and disintegration of groups, interactions amongst biologically isolated

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individuals and social groups. Anthropology studies first of all the man as being at animal and social level and follows the understanding of social reality, using inductive field methods17. The most important aspect, from this point of view, is related to the field developed by the term belief and, implicitly, religion.

“Men and women started worshipping gods right after they visibly became humans. By creating art works, they have also created religions, and not only because they wanted to be sure of their triumph. The beliefs of the beginnings showed amaze and mystery, which have never stopped being an essential component of man’s experience, in this beautiful but frightening world. Just like art, religion as well is an attempt to find meaning and value of existence, despite the sufferings our body is subject to.” (Armstrong, 2009:19)

Spirit in the Christian world, mana in the South Sea isles, numina of the Latins, jinn in the Arabian world, and I only give you the names of the most known to us, are the expression of humans’ desire to get in touch with a superior reality. Personalized, the elements of the universe: the stars, moon and sun, the waters, air, wind, stones, trees have all participated to the expression of the unseen which showed itself to the mortals in exemplary stories core of which will be eternal truth. The historian Otto Rahn (The Sacred, 1917) says that the man started creating myths due to unfulfilled surprise, such amaze being the source of all questions and answers the man has had, already found or still looking for.

The world of the myths represents the prototype of human existence. How far away are we these days and how difficult is it for us to accept that, for example, people thought in Ancient Iran that each person or object in this world (getik) has a correspondent in the archetypal world of sacred reality (menok)? God, irrespective of the name it bears in a cultural formula (group united by language and customs, that is a social structure, a society) is the panacea, parent and teacher. Independently from all the anthropologic canonic literature, a seeker like Gregg Braden, famous New

17 The chaining of the ideas related to the most different aspects of human life:

biological, economical, ecological, historical, medical, political, legal, religious etc.

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Age author, comes to complete the importance to know the code. We didn’t know how to read up to now, his conclusion seems to have been.

The truths of holy books, for example, have always been at hand.

Demonstration proposes a different reading of a sacred text: a “chemical”

reading of the Tora, result of which confirms the axioma: the man keeps the image of the divine archetype. Braden, educated at the State University in Missouri, who then became a researcher of the history of human being evolution, says that elements in our body DNA, which is hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen have as reduced atom mass the numbers 1, 5, 6. The numerical code corresponding the Hebraic letter is the same.

One corresponds to Y, give to H, six to V. Altogether, they sum up to the figure, corresponding to letter G, which is earth, carbon. Therefore,

“each cell of each form of life contains the name of God”:

Thymine (T): hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon; Yod, Hey, Vav, Gimel; Y, H, V, G

Cytosine (C): hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon; Yod, Hey, Vav, Gimel; Y, H, V, G

Adenine (A): hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon; Yod, Hey, Vav, Gimel;

Y, H, V, G

Guanine (G): hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon; Yod, Hey, Vav, Gimel;

Y, H, V, G

YHVH is the name of God, and YHVG, is that of man. Therefore, everything appears in quite logical sequence, Braden draws the conclusion, a constructive dialogue between science and religion can clarify many of the past amazes, amplified so much by the waves of history. Einstein himself, received in 1921 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, answered his question related to the consequences of the relativity theory on theology: “None. Relativity is purely scientific; it has nothing to do with religion.”18

18 Apud Armstrong, A History of God, p. 454

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The Methodologic Field of Cultural Anthropology

Cultural anthropology is an experimental science, its main research method is direct observation, the ethnologic field, parent of which is Bronislaw Malinovski (1884-1942)19. The Polish Anthropologist is the one who argued that people all over the world share certain biological and psychological needs and that the fundamental function of culture is to fully provide such basic needs. Each and every human being, Malinovski says, needs to feel safe in his or her relation to the physical universe. Therefore, when science or technology were unable to explain certain natural phenomena, an eclipse for example, people turned towards religion and magic to rebalance, to cast away their fears and to feel protected. The nature of an institution, he says, is determined by its functions. Therefore, there are three compulsory levels which are found in all societies:

1. culture needs to support basic biological needs: food and procreation, 2. culture needs to provide the basic instruments of social order: law and education,

3. culture needs to provide the integrative process of needs: religion and art.

19 B.M. is considered the inventor of the anthropologic field, the favorite method being participative observation. It consists of living with the Indigenous and participating to all their activities. Their illustrious predecessors: James Frazer, Marcel Mauss, Lucien Levhy-Bruhl were the researchers in library, and processed materials received from the whole world, gathered by others. They used the comparative method. In 1914, the Polish young man M. embarks for the New-Guinea starting in an unprecedented ethnologic adventure.

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If an anthropologist can analyze the ways one culture covers all these needs for its members, Malinovski says, it will certainly set the origin of all cultural features as well. Its land in the Trobriand isles (1915- 1918), from this point of view, is considered fundamental and the sine qua non reference for any anthropological research.

Cultural anthropology is a dynamic science, and it evolved along with society. It is not moralizing and does not question if the discussed event is good or bad per se at the level of the group, it only accounts on it to the remaining society. It studies people behavior, in a certain period of time and in a certain geographical space.

By accepting, by all means, G. Lenclud’s opinion according to which “Anthropology is neither defined by its method nor by its objects”, participative observation, theorized by Malinovski, if enjoying a further look that that of Lévi-Strauss, plenary offers the object of research: “any society different from ours is an object, any group in our society, different from that we are part of, is an object, any object of this very group, we do not adhere to, is an object.” Hence, a precise intellectual step which, in order to make a qualitative field, asks multiple competences from the anthropologist: linguistic, historical, demographical, sociological, psycho- logical, geographical etc. Result of the research is expected to be, just ike Marcel Mauss used to write “a total social fact”. As such, an archiving and interpreting model is made by G. Condominas in Nous avons mangé la forêt de la pierre-génie Gôo. Chronique de Sar Luk, village mnong gar (1954): chronicles, inedited stories, priviledged informers, dialogues as well as unassailable scientific support: photos, archive documents, sketches, lexical analysis, bibliographical support.20

20 For one year, a full Agrarian cycle, Condominas is living with the villagers, Proto- Indochinese population in Sar Luk, in the center of Vietnam, making an emblematic field for any school of anthropology.

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Currents in Anthropology and Schools

Years in a row, from the very 15th century, the works of the travelers, missionaries, militaries who provided ethnographic descrip- tions, by the means of the concerned age, of course, realistic and pertinent, served later researchers to articulate the theoretical field. And always, irrespective of subsequent currents, theoreticians like Mauss şi Durkheim will always be quoted amongst the famous parents of ethnology. The perfect portrait of the ethnologist to be found in Robert Lowie’s book21.

“Just the way a naturalist is impossible to limits him or herself to the study of beautiful butterflies, it’s the same with the ethnographer who must not ignore anything related to tradition. He or she shall write about a youth game on stilts as faithful as if writing about the cosmogonic thoughts of a Tahitian priest – both being study objects for him, just the way the children’s game can reveal as much on the fundamental cultural phenomena like the metaphysical speculations of the adults.

Therefore, the ethnographer is different from the librarian who will only collect curious customs with great dedication. Starting from gross actions, a scientist owes to classify and interpret.

How did cultures end up being what they are today?

How is it that people so far away have so similar ideas and practices?

Why is it that a certain group of people cannot adapt to a certain climate?

Why is always there that guy who keeps on perpetuating an obsolete custom?

21 Lowie, Robert “Histoire de l’ethnologie classique des origines a la seconde guerre mondiale” Paris, Ed. Payot, 1991, 264p.

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These are his issues: and, in the extent he is interested in such things, the ethnographer who describes them becomes a theoretician in ethnology.”

Scientific anthropology emerges therefore with the European colonialism. It was influenced by diverse philosophical tendencies and supported by Darwin’s revolutionary ideas (1809-1882). If we are to connect the real moment of the emergence of ethnology to the emergence of evolutionism, we shall quote first of all two extremely famous names.

Charles Lyell (1797- 1875), Scottish geologist, careful researcher of the alluvium, very interested in the origins of the human species, looked for the answer related to the age of the human race in relation to the known history and traditions. The issue Lyell raised regarded the changes which had been taking place in nature without any triggering event. Why couldn’t we assume that Earth is gradually changing, extremely slowly, and that the results of such changes can lead to conclusions to be taken into account? His work influenced a lot the scholars of the times but especially Charles Darwin (1809-1882). During a study travel (1831-1836), on the Beagle ship, always carrying the book of his compatriot, Lyell, and by comparing the fauna and flora in Galapagos and Australia, he drafts the theory of transformism (transfor- mation of the living organisms under the influence of environment) which would later lead to the On the Origin of Species (1858). This thesis made Samuel Wilberforce, a British cleric quite fierce. The victory he had gained on June 30, 1860 from the stand in Oxford University Museum Library was melted later on in the retorts of science. Wilberforce said that on the date the world was approximately 6000 years old. According to his calculus, after an extremely literal lecture of the Bible, God had created us on October 23, 4004 BC and the man had to be looked after by the philosophers and Church, had its definitive place in nature and no connection to the apes. We actually were the divinity’s favorite kids, masters above everything already created and it was nothing different from our history of the best of any other, come from virgin lands. As a systematic approach, anthropology starts like a look of ours, the

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occidentals, over them “the savage, the primitive, non-Europeans”. The fundamental problem will raise between I, we and the other, the others, them. Anthropology is actually with a target: see is substituted by watch (the medieval meaning of the term being survey) (Affergan, 1987).

Therefore, one of the first conclusions may be that strangers have always done strange things:

“The first spontaneous reaction to an individual is to imagine him as an inferior, as he is different from us: he’s not even a human being or, if he is, is an inferior barbarian; if he does not speak our language, it means he speaks none, just like Colon used to think (Don Bartolome Colon, Admiral). This is how the Slavs in Europe name their German neighbor nemec, the mute; maya from Yucatan name the Toltec invaders as nunob, the mute… the Aztecs tell their neighbors nonualca, the mute;

they share the despise of all people for their neighbors, considering that the people farther away culturally or geographically speaking are not even good enough to be sacrificed and consumed.” (Leach, 1980, p.73, apud Vintilă Mihăilescu22)

The nations who had undertaken the industrial revolution and had imposed their dominance all over in the world belonged to Northern Europe. The South had permanently been devalued as compared to the North. Heroes had to be tall, well-built, with bodies similar to those of the gods, firm eyes with bluish or steel tones, not Spanish, Italians, Jews or other races with their slightly olive skin and prominent nose. The hero of masterpieces (especially Verne’s) in the period right after the industrialization was a genie in engineering, physics or mathematics, connoisseur of biology and archeology.

Darwin’s evolutionism is applied in social sciences and known as Darwinism. The Americans will take it over in 1975 as sociobiology.

Irrespective of the steps of Darwinism and its applications, it does not explain definitively the complex evolution of the man, task which turned into a study object for anthropology. The anthropologic principles have

22 Mihăilescu, Vintilă, Anthropologie. Cinci introduceri , Polirom, 2007

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crystallized in: evolutionism23, cultural diffusionism24, functionalism25. Each of them actually shows that living in a society means expecting

23 The Evolutionism is the 19th century is mainly made of Charles Darwin’s biological evolutionism. According to Darwin, the natural selection meets six laws, the first five being drafted as early as 1858, and the sixth being formulated in 1871: 1. The species vary, the young people are not identical to their parents, nor identical amongst them, the species are subject of the evolution, which means that each of them changes along time, are not identical, fixed, closed; 2. Getting new varieties of plants or domestic animals stays at the latitude of the genitor; 3. Natural selection is made depending on the climate;

4. In nature, ecology has a determining role; 5. Fighting for survival within the same species leads to selection, the strong defeats the weak, within the same species, individuals who got to maturity in various places, are not identical; 6. Sexual selection determines the victory of vigorous males. Social Evolutionism is based on the writings of Herbert Spencer (he encouraged liberalism and the thesis of unlimited freedom of individuals) and Karl Marx (the author, with Friederich Engels, of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. The first phrase of the paper can be considered the perfect synthesis of his believs: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles"). The evolutionism represented by Lewis Morgan, Edward Tylor, James Frazer, considered the birth document of modern anthropology by the fixation of the anthropological themes, which became classical: myth, magic, religion, relatives. The evolutionism of the 20th century, known as American cultural ecology or cultural materialism: critic of unilinear evolution: Gordon Childe (introduces in 1930 the concept of Urban Revolution, which he debates in his book in 1936, Man Makes Himself), Leslie White (defender of the Neo-Evolutionism, for him culture is a general urban phenomenon, the plural “cultures” not being indicated in the study of anthropology), Julian Steward (his name is related to the concept of ecological culture, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution, his book in 1955 shows that the way culture changes is influenced by the surrounding environment), Marshall Sahlins (Stone Age Economics (1972), comes with the paradoxical idea that primitive economics have been up to now the only society of actual abundancy), Elman Service (studied cultural evolution in Latin America and in the Caribbean, finds four stages of social evolution which correspond to four levels of political organizing), Marvin Harris (his final work, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, speaks about the bad influence of the politics consequences in postmodernist theories).

24 Or historical particularism. The bases of the theory of diffusionism were laid in Germany, country known for its major interest paid to ethnographic museums, with many researchers engaged in identifying specific cultural tracks: rites, myths, tools and traditional architecture. One of the first representatives of the German diffusionism was Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), German anthropologist, geographer and ethnographer who had a significant contribution for the diffusionist and migration theories in the 19th century. Ratzel’s ideas were processed abusively by the Nationalist-Socialist government in Germany, Hitler arguing, by erroneously interpreting Ratzel’s theories, his expansion politics. Far from being a racist, Ratzel had explained the influence of the geographic environment on the human habitat. A different very important representative, as well German as origin, emigrates to America, and becomes the father of modern American

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something. “It’s amongst ourselves, in a society and we expect amongst ourselves a result; this is the essential form of community” (Marcel Mauss, 1934). Anthropology is based on others’ memory: learning, conservation, restitution are, in the same time, biological and cultural processes, and metamemory is translated by the capacity of people who became aware of the faculty to memorize, processed and used in the aspiration of emancipation. Our knowledge depends on a reminiscence, Plato says. In other words, we truly understand only what our memories evoke, each of us being a “super-impressed” micro-universe with messages sent by the five senses, capable of subsequent “projections”:

director, actor and spectator in one’s own film. Representing something invisible means making it visible. Ancient art, revolving around invisible realities, which we call gods, showed that the Divine is beyond the visible.

anthropology: Franz Boas, is the one insisting upon the difference between the biological inheritance and cultural inheritance, and enters the concept of cultural relativism. His most important work is: Race, Language and Culture din1940.

25 Functionalism imposes Anthropology as science. Emile Durkheim defines the social fact. Bronislaw Malinowski develops the method of participative observation: Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Sex and repression in savage society (1927), Corsal Gardens and their Magic (1935), A Scientific Theory of Culture, (1944), A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967). The Structural-functionalism of Alfred Radcliff-Brown presents Anthropology as compared sociology and as science of society (representative in order to understand the role of social structure in the perpetuation of social order are Structure and Function in Primitive Society from 1952 and A Natural Science of Society from 1957). The functionalist methodology consists of a synchronic approach, the transcultural comparative method, the analysis of the function of religion and of affiliation relationships, of the ethnographic present, of rituals, of myths related to keeping social order.

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Codes and Signs

„You only see what you know.” Goethe From its very beginnings, man has fulfilled a rhythm, has received and sent messages tuned to such rhythm, swing of which, Rilke says, is breathing. By inspiration, man gets informed and by expiration he creates.

Expiration is self-giving. “Man breathes an average of 25 920 times a day, and this is the number of the years from a complex platonic year (the number of years needed for the sun to end a full tour of the zodiac). The average or ideal length of human life – seventy-two years – has the same number of days” (Black:35). Therefore, any gesture is the result of such process in two strokes. Knowledge gathered by senses is transmitted by gesture. “Projective empathy” as named, animates in our eyes the show of universe and infiltrates an almost organic vitality which explains the animism of primitive thinking” (Benoist, 1995:18). The word sign comes from the Latin signum, verb root secare, which means to cut. Leaving a sign means signing in, cutting by using the hand-the instrument of all instruments, the bark of a tree. In Indo-European languages, etymolo- gically, to say, comes from a common root which means to point finger.

The word and the action interwove in a sign, and the first speaker related to the surrounding things after having identified the self as his or her own person. The symbols of letters hide multiple additional layers, each with very deep meanings. The symbols, named letters, have always had at least double significances: the already formed sentences which communicate concrete situations and the sublayers leading to subtle relations, per se.

Etymology, this archeology of language26,27, is the only one able to decipher the symbolic mechanism of words.

26 “If we are to cross the genealogic tree in an Indo-European language of a word family going back on the stream of time, guided by the identity amongst phenomena, we get to a root, onomatope or simple sound, meaning of which is very general and sent, with infinite nuances, to all the derived branches. Let’s have for example the onomatope clic- clac and the root fla. Clic-clac translates a clink (le claquement) of two surfaces. Hence

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From France to Spain, from Atlas to Black Africa or to China, prehistorical caves testify for the signs left by the relocation of image into reality. The accuracy of the style, the beauty of the colors, the care for details, made Picasso exclaim, when he visited for the first time the cave Lascaux (discovered in 1940, in France, down by river Vézère, in Périgord),: “I feel I’ve learnt nothing so far!”

The first tools crafted by the man still keep special significances.

The Double Edged-Sickle has existed in the whole Mediterranean world (from Etruscan cemeteries in Vetulonia and up to Tarsus where it shall identify to the Tarku God, in Lidia, Caria and Crete). Its Carian name, lábrus, has the same root with the word labyrinth, the sanctuary related to the cult of the Minotaur (Crete deity looking like a bull and the master of lightning). The Greek name of the stone axe is kéraunia, which means precisely the stone of lightning. From a work tool, by assimilation, it will become the symbol of state power (fascia de lictor of the Romans and Etruscans). The first tools, musical instruments and ancient weapons are recorded by the mythology as mark-symbols of the heroes who used them:

the wheel – representation of the cult of the sun and its rays – led to the symbol of the cross, Achilles’ spear, Tanaquilla’s spinning wheel, Orpheus’

lyre, Marsyas’28 flute, Agamemnon’s29 scepter, Memnon’s sword, Pyrrhos’

shield, Cybelles' tympans and cymbals30 etc.. (Donini, 1968)

the cliquet (the clink), le cliquetis (the clatter), le declic (the click), la clanche (the bar of the doorknob), the verb declancher (to open a door), le cliche (cliché, the noise made by typographic letters) when falling on marble). The Latin word clavis, key, led to clore, to close, to inclure (to include, to involve), to conclure (to conclude) …” (Benoist: 37)

27 Here you have, for example, much closer to our times and us, the Romanians, the way we have in Romanian the word mulţumesc (and its older versions, mulţămesc, mulţam).

During harsh feudal times, characterized by wars, terrible blood sheds and betrayals, when the lord’s life was always in threat, the greeting: “Long life for many years, Your Majesty!”

was invested by strong magic valences. The greeting changed into a salute, Mulţi ani dumitale, boierule!, welded to mulţam, and subsequently had the specific suffix – escu.

29 The scepter, the shield, the sword were worked by Hephaistos

30 Instruments dedicated to Cibella (a type of drum with leather very stretched out).

Hence the name of tympanum (for the god, but also for the anatomic structure).

According to Varon, the tympanum represents the globe the ancients did not imagine as a perfect circle, and cymbals are the two hemispheres of the sky which include earth.

The sound of cymbals is named in Latin tinnitus (and as medical term it regards the noises within the ear).

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Oral and Written

In-fans means not having a voice to utter words. In order to be declared “admitted” in this world, the person with no voice needs to issue a rhythmic sound, a cry in balance, at the boundary between animal and human. It is the sound searched by poets in their attempt to harmonize their voices to the universe, changing it afterwards in a speech and qualified as ineffable. This resonance is named muthos by the Greek. For muthos the geometrical perfection of the word to be uttered, of the logos, is not a reality. The common root in Indo-European languages, mu, which has also formed the Greek word muein (to be closed, to be calm, to shut up) and the Latin word mutus (to shut up), applied to the origins of the animal which can only “say” mu, belongs both to the infans-infant who does not speak, but cries, moans, yells, and to the man from the end of his road, at the point of his death becoming a child again by silence (as his closed lips, uniting the skies and earths, do not allow the word to come out). If we consider the upper lip as being the sky, and the lower lip as being the earth, we shall accept, possibly, the role of creating principle the uttered word has. In speaking, the worlds mix up, the upper meet the lower, in the worthiest secrecy of human being. Words get materiality, they can be gentle, sharp, cruel, puzzled, creating. The same root leads to the word myth.

“Or, the idea of silence is related to the things which, by their nature, can only be expressed by symbols. Myth and mystery therefore come from the same esoteric ideology character of which comes from their primordiality and need. As such, the tendencies revealed by myths are models present on the background of each and every performance, like an ancestral memory forgotten by those subjected to repeat it.”

(Benoist, 1995: 120)

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Societies use the myth in order to explain existence, and the stories are waved by various threads: the cosmogonic myths tell about the origin of the world, orders the birth of the universe, the gods being the main heroes. Heroical stories come afterwards to explain the way things settled in the crafted world, the fundamental role devolves upon the ancestors now, half gods, half humans, who will fight incredible fights on stranger and stranger lands. At the end of the story, we find how a certain land was occupied by a certain group of people.

Concerns become natural afterwards for the survival of the structures fulfilled as such and other stories flow by setting the rules of the place, putting disobedience under atrocious threats: eschatological myths (flood, earthquakes, end of the world). A good reading of the myth, understanding the code (the common Latin root: codex, norms, rules) explain the organizing of each and every society. Step by step, the hierarchy, deployed by the story, birth is next, bringing up and good operation of the social organism: we may say, by replacing the terms, a socio-physiology of the human body integrated in the social body and the results of such metabolism, the word being the supreme food.

The Jew dabar (word) amounts the creating powers of the uttered word. the speech of performance therefore becomes performing in the sense Jean Louis Austin (1989,24)31 gave it: “I only utter, my word is the one generating effect”. The specificity of oral literature stays in its essential performance, in uttering the words. In other words, we speak about a complex action by which a message with poetic value is simultaneously transmitted and perceived, here and now. A wise old man in Mali used to say: “Oral tradition is the generator and maker of a type of special man… Where writing does not exist, the man is word. In Africa, every time an old man dies, a whole library burns down” (Hampate Bâ, Kaydara). Therefore, orality is the memory of humanity itself out of which all the other writings get inspired. The Greek literature rose from the transcriptions of texts composed based on the oral laws of memorizing. In Phaedrus, Plato (1953, I.II.243) brings altogether face to

31 Je ne fais pas que dire, ma parole produit un effet, j’accomplis, du fait de la situation de parole, la chose même que je dis accomplis.

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face, in a famous confrontation, Thamas (Ammon, the god of the word) and Thot (the god of writing and death, the patron of the scribs, the inventor of the calculus and writing): the technique of writing will bring oblivion in the mind of those who learned it, as they will stop using their memory: and will trust the writing, the outside, by strange characters, and not the inside, the deepness in themselves, they will commemorate.

For the main actor in an oral literary work, everything starts from within, by an interior sequence of text in his own imaginary: a proto- image, a real continuum no expression shall divide, with a rapidity of the tale that grows higher and higher, in a suite of mysteries only accessible to the writers of epopees. Paul Zumthor (1972: 232) is convinced that the poet sees his or her characters, gods, events as words come out. We assist, he says, the birth of a proto-son. The oral literary text becomes therefore fluctuant like the waters of a river, with various waves, gets created along with the performance and only exists if uttered. This is precisely why rehearsal is a lot more than useful in executing the oral text: it prepares the chaining by priming the progression. It gives time to insert the newly arrived information into the content, the extraordinary into the real, the unseen and unheard into the known, memorizing and natural referral of the meaning along the whole structure.

“My child, what a word has escaped the barrier of thy teeth? How should I, then, forget

godlike Odysseus, who is

beyond all mortals in wisdom, and beyond all has paid sacrifice to the immortal gods”32

In order for a fecund relation to exist between ethnology and writing, irrespective of its nature, the careful study of the linguistic phenomenon of each and every culture is a must and of all the textual productions it created. Anthropologic literature confirms this relation from its very beginnings. There is no artist before the work. Creation defines the artist, gives birth to him, promotes him, Hegel would say. The image transposed to the text becomes the polyvalent instrument of

32 Homer, Odiseea, Univers, 1979, (95), p.33

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mythical thinking. Only used as such, image gets its precise meaning in relation to the place occupied and its function in the waving of a poetic system (Burgos, 1988: 184). In deciphering the writing of the imaginary, Jean Rudhardt33 shows that while the myth is established in the instrument which uses the common linguistic structures it is subject to during its development, within the thread of the story, continuous disintegration occurs, the images get grouped in “elementary structural layouts” and “general organizing layouts”, and therefore contribute to the

“rise of a meaning”:

„One day, at noon, Sihai died. All of a sudden, two trees grew out of his mouth which sprouted and flourished; but wind shook them, and the flowers fell to earth. Diseases came from this flower. A tree grew from Sihai’s throat and gold came out of it. Another tree grew from his heart and it gave birth to the people.” (Frazer, The Golden Bough)

33 Rudhardt, Jean, Image et structure dans le langage mythique, Genève, p.94

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Figures and Images

The parent of the term we use today, figure is the Latin word figura; the latter belonging to a family of words which evoke a plastic representation, made according to a model: fingere (to trim), figulus (the potter), fictor (the sculptor), effigies (the image, the statue). Figura is the inheritor of all the meanings of its Greek homologue, schema. Indeed, the Plato-Aristotle lexicon distinguishes two categories of terms which cover the notion of form; on the one hand, the nouns morphe and eidos which show the idea coming to in- form matter; on the other hand, schema is the sensual status, the materialization of such idea. And even more, the schema also applies to any exterior appearance or makeover of an internal entity: costume, mime, make-up etc. In parallel, the schema is related to rhetoric where it evokes the expression of the exterior idea of the author:

Aristotle speaks, for example, de of figures of the syllogism, schemata silogisma. The schema transmits therefore most of the connotations for the term figura, which plunges for the first time in a rethoric meaning for Cicero and for the unknown author Ad Herenicum (1st century BC). Here, figura names the three levels of style (gravis, mediocris, attenuata) (De oratore, III, 199), while the expression forma orationis applies more specifically, as related to Cicero, to the figures of style.

Quintilian (1st century) will consecrate the figura as a figure of speech. According to him, it was included in one of the five parts of rhetoric (invention, memory, action, disposition, allocution), as it is related to the words order of the arguments chosen beforehand by the author: allocution. Even within it, words are inserted in a subpart qualified by the ancients as ornatus or the art to adorn a text. If we were to consider the various functions attributed to the figures by orators, we would obviously be struck by the special concern given to speech adornment. Surely, some figures can be imposed by the imperious need to cure the language cheerfulness, the concrete case of the catachresis, which imposes, lacking a proper term, the diversion of a word from its

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initial meaning. For example, in case we need to invoke the leg of the table, we may, due to reserve or delicacy to need the use of a euphemism (Quintilian).

However, most often, figura appears like an ornament added to the word and the ancients appointed metaphorically figures as colors, lights, flowers, rocks of the speech. Cicero appreciates it especially with Venustas, that is absolute seduction of figurative language. Or, if we’re to admit that there is a makeup of language, we also accept the hiatus from the actual phrase (figurative) of the writer as well as the virtual expression of the same thought, which may produce what the classics named the simple, primitive and fundamental status of language (Dumarsais, sec.

VIII). This distinct notion of figurative language becomes capital for the definition of figures.

In its beginnings (12th century), the term image, derived of the Latin word imago, appointed as a figura, the reproduction of a model, very close to the original, loyal to it. By removing any distance, imago suggested the greatest mimetic proximity: portrait, copy. Despite all this, during the 18th century, the term became, by analogy, synonymous to figure (comparison, metaphor), ending up by evoking any form of figure or semantic anomaly. Actually, the term is characterized by an extreme imprecision and by multiplying secondary names, covered by one of generic words: symbol, correspondence, theme, myth etc. Image gets loaded by the energy of the object it represents. I-mago is magic in the sense of the representation of invisible. Representation acts on sight, in- forms it on its reality, falls asleep or awakens the awareness of the watcher. Image has a funerary genealogy. Imago was the wax mold of the deceased person’s face. Simulacrum was the image similarly reproduced, first of all a phantom and second of all, a face. Eidolon was the soul of the dead which left the body just like an invisible shadow. Sema, which gave us the sign, was the tombstone as representation or double of it. Image is always associated to the double.

From here on, we can try, just the way Wilfried Smekens34 did, defining the image as a signified found on the position of signifier. In

34 Histoire des poétiques, PUF, "Fondamental", 1997

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other words, we can rephrase: a sense generating sense. We need to take into account that image is not compulsorily an immediate correspondence between own senses and figurative senses, between the compared and comparing.

All this, in the Romantism, have undergone serious complications.

Images can coexist in a text, images which cannot be decoded as they seem not to be the carriers of obvious symbolism. They do not prove to be reducible to their own sense. These images, we have no translation of which, should be, in order to be understood, compared to other images which shall allow maybe the establishment of a common scheme, of significant repetitions. This work of analysis of the images belongs to the subjects which were built around it, especially in the 19th century:

thematic critic, thematology, psychoanalysis, ethnolinguistics, compared ethnology.

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Nature of Symbol

“Deciphering a message means perceiving a symbolic form”. Gombrich

At its origin, the symbol was an object cut in two, fragments of ceramic, wood or metal. Two persons kept, each, one part: two guests, the creditor and the debtor, two pelerines, two humans who shall not see each other for some time etc. Getting the two parts closer, they will admit later the good reception by their host, the debts they have, the friendship connecting them. For ancient Greeks, symbols were signs of recognition, by their parents, of the children exposed to possible risks. By analogy, the term transferred to the tokens which gave the soldiers the right to their pay, to indemnities and other entitlements in money. Symbol has the double role to separate but also to put together. It evokes a community which has been divided, but with a chance to reunification. Any symbol implies a part of broken sign. This is why the meaning of the symbol is discovered in what brokenness is; each and every part obtained as such also get new meanings. The history of symbols show us that any object can be invested by symbolic values, irrespective of its kind: stones, metals, trees, flowers, fruit, animals, water sources, rivers and oceans, mountains and valleys, planets, fire, lightning etc. or its representation:

geometric shapes, numbers, rhythms, idea, sound etc. The symbol is affirmed as an apparently discernible term indiscernible of which is a different term. The example below, the caduceus, is carrier of multiple significances, stratified in time.

Hermes’ caduceus, scepter or walking stick was a rod with two snakes entwined. During the Greco-Roman world, it symbolized peace and commerce – from the Latin caduceum, represented by a winged rod, with two snakes entwined around it. For the Greeks, it had initially been a heraldic rod, winged now and then, which was added two wool ribbons.

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