Conclusion

Summary

Semantic chains and shapes

It was possible for Skorupski in 1976, in a well-argued essay, to castigate what he called the straitjacket of equating ‘ritual’, ‘sacred’ and ‘symbolic’ and seeing them as one half of a dichotomy opposed to ‘practical’, ‘profane’ and ‘instrumental’. In 1975 (but too late for Skorupski's study) Needham suggested that anthropologists' analytical concepts are in fact ‘polythetic’, often akin to Wittgenstein's ‘odd job’ words, which refer to a multiplicity of phenomena between which there are overlapping family resemblances but not fixed criteria. He had touched on the same issue in an earlier publication but had not raised it to a more general problem of epistemology (1971). The impact of the later article was striking, and a number of studies appeared thereafter, at first acknowledging the influence, which then swiftly became an assumed part of the subject's theoretical capital. Few anthropologists would nowadays fail to subject what they regard as a key concept in their analysis to critical scrutiny, nor to ‘unpack’ it. Nor, if they make use of such analytical dichotomies, do they do so unquestioningly.

We appear to have moved a long way from Leach's own radical departure from Durkheim, when he rejected the latter's absolute distinction between sacred and profane and proposed instead that these two be seen as aspects, rather than separate types, of action.