Yangqi Zheng

Csordas

ANSC 129

20 January 2020

Intersecting Meaning-Systems

A prominent theme of this session’s readings was the intersection between multiple self-

stable systems of meaning. In Navajoland, traditional healing and meaning systems, the Native

American Church, and Christian systems coexist, often within the same individual. In referring

to such meaning-systems as self-stable entities, abstracted away from the conscious meaning-

making person, a dangerous presumption is made.

The idea of a narrative as embedded in society, presupposing that “society” as another

something in-itself, what does that idea entail? The subtle trails from the society to the person are

not clearly drawn, nor from the mind do the ideas it produces, and to the symbolic systems which

seem to govern those ideas. Then when we speak of the cointeraction of symbolic systems, with

each its rich history and content, how might we draw the effects all the way back to that mind

which produces them, and to the body?

The narrative of a person in society is meaningful. It reflects influences from the outside,

from cointeracting symbolic systems indeed. But the child in the psychiatric ward experiences a

different world from the sage-shaman and the ancient teller of fantastic stories. There is history

to the narrative which needn’t be in awareness for the narratives to fluently co-mingle. The

bloody conquests of the indigenous by the foreign do not seem to be structurally mirrored,

necessarily at least, in the mind of the modern colonized person who integrates the two.
 There are parallels between the tales, analogies are drawn between the previously

separated, though we are unsure if they were indeed somehow the same. The schizophrenic

delusion is the ancestor-ghost. The symbols are symbols of each other. We of different lands,

whence may we assess our differences and commonalities? For indeed we are all humans in the

same world, but at how different locii, to what effect?

The one who today declares “I am traditional” may well have broken the sacred lineage,

yet still we see power there. The personal is political, and the political personal, all immersing all

else in that perpetual meaning-making process. Perhaps the sacred lineage is too far off now to

be of importance. And perhaps we have killed God and resurrected Him again.

If existing traditions which purport strength in their purity, being tainted and corrupted by

the external, nonetheless retain their power, what might we make of their claim? A deeper and

invisible something is suggested; the powerful narrative which is also a meta-narrative, entwined

so inextricably in itself, does not know the source of its own power. Several ouroboros tangle

themselves in a Gordian knot, which, do we now attempt to cut?