6 - Towards a comparative study of dualist symbolism

Summary

The various paths we have taken across the range of classificatory schema bring us to a small number of cross-roads in symbolic analysis. Though few in number, these cross-roads are hard to identify, and resemble the ‘crossings of the roads’ in the bush where the Nyamwezi sometimes feel the need to call upon their ancestors with sacrifices and, when a risky journey has removed them from familiar landscapes and daily certainties, to ask questions of the beyond.

HIERARCHICAL OPPOSITION

We have contrasted binary opposition and hierarachical opposition, with symmetry and complementarity characterising the former, and asymmetry and the existence of different levels defining the latter. In the case of the former, the opposition a/ā (‘a/not-a’) corresponds to a logic of addition: a + ā = ā + ā = the set (or = zero), no matter what difference in value is allowed between the two poles. The totality is then simply a ‘complementarity’, such that one effectively intuits a ‘homogeneity’ between a and a, right and left, summer and winter, black and white. In the case of the latter, commutativity (a + ā = ā + a) is no longer meaningful, ‘a’ is posited as value, and thereby defines an actual domain for its contrary, ‘not-a’. This domain is delimited by that of a and encompassed by a. We are no longer on one plane only, but have to take two different levels into account. The totality is composed of two terms, but it pre-exists them and gives them their meaning.