Recomendaciones derivadas del análisis

description of the dangers inherent in the young man's advancement.

"The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others* The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status* Not only is transition itself dangerous, but also the rituals of segregation are the most dangerous phase of the rites* So often do we read that boys die in initiation ceremonies, or that their sisters and mothers are told to

fear for their safety, or that they used in the old days to die from hardship or fright, or by supernatural punishment for their

ceramonias which are so safe that the threat of danger sounds like a hoax (Vansina, 1955). But we can be sure that the

trumped up dangers express something important about marginality. To say that the boys risk their lives says precisely that to go out of the formal structure and to enter the margins is

to be exposed to power that is enough to kill them or make their manhood."

This being the case, the helmet would appear to have served as a symbol of some importance. The headgear and its attendant body armour may be seen as a demonstration of the wearer's suitably adult attitude for just as the commonly understood dangers of the ritual have been accepted so everything has been done to reduce the risks without profaning the ceremony. The helmet could also be taken to signify the end of the young man's childhood and therefore his parents last chance to treat him as one. Whilst the prica of £28.95 would then be ambivalent, a token of their concern for the future and a

declaration of the way they have cared for him, the choice of the helmet through the medium of tradB is no more than a reflection of the means by which contemporary society decides upon the appropriateness of any potential solution to the problem inherent in the renegotiation of social order and everyday reality.

One point remains, however; the boy and the ritual were despoiled accidentally. The helmet was understood to mean "fear for your son's safety in these dangerous rites" and not"the wearer of this is a

sacrifice for his peer's safe conduct." A similar importance attaches to the origins of the equipment for whilst common sense observations such as "£28.95 for a what? Christ, when I was his age, I wouldn't

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even wear one let alone buy iti might mitigate the sales of the 'best' headgear, helmets are required for the ceremony and will be worn in one form or another whatever the cost. The mass production of this gear is a turning point of the analysis for it represents a meeting between "prior" rites and the current "design of persons and goods".

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As Gouldner (1976) remarks,

"It is because of the attenuation of certain older ideologies in modern bourgeois society that there emerged a renewed interest in a "technocratic consciousness" with which the corporate order and its symbols of authority might be newly legitimated".

This legitimation is negotiated by means of cultural processes such as the football match where mass produced articles are so much a part of common sense understandings as to preclude their exclusion

from everyday use. So it is that neither the candidates nor the society to which they aspire can be envisaged without reference to those who control the means of production. A similar view may be

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taken of Papanek's (1980) declaration that his story is relevant because "Mr Pelton wore the best and most expensive (£28.95) football helmet being manufactured.” The football player believed himself to be safe because, like the wearers of the ”15 million safety helmets, hard hats, football helmets, etc., sold annually” and never "tested in kinetic energy situations”, he had put a symbol of order between himself and some aspect of life that was outside "the formal structure”.

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Sperber*s (1979) development of this argument is of particular importance when considering a society which derives its structure from the "creation and movement of goods."

"The external experience of daily life and the internal one of dream and reverie constantly modify schemes of symbolic

interpretation. In a more dramatic way, an individual may be initiated fairly late in life to certain rites, or may convert to another religion and thus learn a new symbolism without it following that his symbolic mechanism must have been either incomplete or radically different before. The symbolic life _ of an individual does not divide itself neatly into a period of

learning and a period of use of an established mechanism. Symbolism, because it is cognitive, remains throughout life a learning mechanism.”

Sperber would seem to be suggesting a considerable amendment to "the science of the concrete" for if the symbolic values of goods are subjected to the same processes of reassessment as common sense understandings of reality, then the appropriateness of "whatever is at hand" must be reconsidered in the same manner as the football helmet, which was once unheard of and is now unremarkable.

The following echo of Sperber*s insight comes from a Northern factory which is perhaps best known for the construction of "rolling chassis" for lorries and 1buses. A machinist, who specialised in the making of crankshafts, was astonished to hear the Quality Control Department describe the tolerances on his work as "all over the place, too bloody big one day, too small the next." The machinist had his own gauges and calipers which were checked at least twice a day against those of the Quality Control department and still the rejection rate ran at between one in twenty and one in thirty pieces of work.

The puzzled machinist eventually visited the Quality Control Department where he explained his position. He then suggested that the Plaster Calipers might themselves be checked. The chill provoked by this impudence became icy when the machinist made reference to a stickercn the Gauges which said, quite simply "to be checked; 3rd Play 1983". It was by then late August. The problem was finally

resolved by the Works Manager. He felt compelled to give the machinist a severe warning because he would accept neither the strictures of the Quality Control Department nor any share of the blame for the poor goods being made. The machinist was obviously "a troublemaker."

That all the gauges and calipers in the Quality Control Department were then replaced was, of course, purely coincidental for whilst

this apparently unscheduled refurbishment may have been unexplained, no one offered anything approaching an gjology to the machinist.

The incident is important for a number of reasons; it shows that everyday reality is, in part, negotiated through the medium of

work, that understandings of speech and such as machinery are continually redefined in terms of each other and, finally, that research techniques involving conversational material are bound to include these consider-* ations. There are, however, imbalances within these determinations that reflect the nature of contemporary society by showing some to be more capable than others of restructuring the "symbolic mechanisms".

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Giddens (1977) is suitably direct.

"The production of interaction has three fundamental elements: its constitution as 'meaningful1; its constitution as a moral

order;and its constitution as the operation of relations of power." Gidden's assessment can be usefully developed on two fronts.

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The first, as Sahlins (1974) is quick to point out, is the way in

which the importance of work, as a measure of an individual's contribution to society, is culturally determined.

"That the labor forces of primitive communities are also under­ used is easier to document, thanks to a greater ethnographic attention. (Besides, this dimension of primitive underproduction conforms closely to European prejudices, so that many others besides anthropologists have noticed it, although the more appropriate deduction from the cultural differences might have been that Europeans are overworked). It is only necessary to keep in mind that the manner by which labor power is withheld from production is not everywhere the same. The institutional

modalities vary considerably; from marked cultural abbreviat­ ions of the individual ujorking-life span to immoderate standards of relaxation - or what is probably a better understanding of the latter, very moderate standards of "sufficient work".

Sahlin’s argument shows that participation in work is not only a requirement of individual citizenship but also an important means of maintaining the structure of a given society. The second extension of Gidden's (1977) assessment concerns the distribution of whatever has been produced by these efforts* Mauss (1974) believes that

"All these institutions reveal the same kind of social and psychological pattern* Food, women, children, possessions, charms, land, labour, services, religious offices, rank - every­ thing is stuff to be given away and repaid* In perpetual

interchange of what we may call spiritual matter, comprising men and things, these elements pass and repass between clans and individuals, ranks, sexes and generations."

It is therefore impossible to negotiate everyday reality in terms other than those which are grounded in a recognition of societal dependence on the interrelationship between employment, production and

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consumption* As Giddens (1977) observes of the cultures that have industrialised these processes,

"The legitimacy of the class structure is integrally bound up with private property, as a normatively (legally) defined set of rights, sanctioned on the most general level by the state; these rights are also important elements of the structure of class domination* Finally, the signification of class structure exists as a 'class consciousness' or what I call 'class aware­ ness'* Each of these features of class structure is routinely drawn upon by actors in the course of constituting class

relations as interactions; in drawing on them as modalities of interaction, they also reproduce them as, that structure* Class structure is both the medium and the outcome of social

reproduction*"

Two aspects of this argument are of particular importance to the development of ths thesis* The first is grounded in the coincidence between Giddens' analysis and Sperber's (Op.cit) assertion that symbolism is a life-long "learning mechanism", a union which implies that common sense understandings of property assume the continual renegotiation of meaning* However, ownership does not have to be

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immediately apparent for, as Volosinov (1973) points out, it is enough for the significant object to exist.

"Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with the totality of users of the same set of signs of ideological

communication. Thus various classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently orientated accents intersect

in every ideological sign. Sign becomes the arena of the

class struggle."

In methodological terms, this would seem to indicate Gidden's (Qp.cit)^ "ethno-methods" for an analysis of the various under­ standings which are generated by those who are party to a given sign. It will therefore be argued that the exchanges suggested by Mauss

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(Qp.cit) are only possible because the "totality" ascribes meaning to objects in a way which is both parallel to and dependent upon the

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