BITERNARY OPPOSITION AS AN ELEMENT OF MULTIPOLAR SOCIO-CULTURAL SYSTEM DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE IN POSTSTRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Abstract

The target of research is the structuralist and poststructuralist paradigm of describing and explaining cultural constants through binary or ternary semiotic codes. The author’s hypothesis, based on anthropological theories of V. Turner and Cl. Levi-Strauss as well as those of contemporary South American anthropologists E. V. de Castro and E. Kohn, is that socio-cultural oppositions must be considered not as binary but as ternary ones. The main aim is to trace the influence of structuralism and poststructuralism on the construction of binary, ternary, tetrary schemes of coordination and subordination of elements of complex «neuro»-systems in Ethnology and Social Anthropology. The originality of the study lies, first, in clarification of the formal components of binarism and its derivatives (such as «monodualism», «monotrialism», and «bitrialism», the latter being introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time) as an approach that claims to be a universal explanation of the existence of cultural constants, and, secondly, in author’s suggestion to replace the discrete horizontal and vertical planar projections of the «primitive ontology», produced by binary and ternary oppositions, with the one integrating them into three, namely tridimensional, «bitriplet». Conclusion: in social sciences logical binarism of structuralism together with post-structuralism were replaced by tetrary, monodual, bitriple semiotic schemes with a large number of poles and fractional scale divisions of the states of analyzed systems that are able to capture and describe not only two-dimensional but three-dimensional statically-balanced and dynamically-non-balanced states of complex metaphysical, mytho-ritual, and social systems.

Keywords

• binarizm
• ternary oppositions
• post-structuralism
• neurosemiotics
• cl. levi-strauss
• vyach. vs. ivanov
• georges dumézil
• victor turner