Counterpoints by Rodney Needham
"Counterpoints" by Rodney Needham is a scholarly exploration of the concept of opposition in cultural analysis, challenging prevailing notions of how opposing pairs of terms—such as black/white and man/woman—function within various societies. Needham posits that the idea of opposition is not as straightforward as commonly perceived, arguing that it must be carefully reconsidered before being utilized as an analytical tool in ethnography. He suggests that while human cognition often tends to categorize experiences in binary terms, these classifications are complex and influenced by metaphorical thinking rather than a universal framework. The book, which stems from lectures presented at the University of Oxford, includes nine chapters that delve into historical perspectives on opposition, critiques of existing theories, and an appraisal of contemporary anthropological thought. Throughout, Needham emphasizes the importance of comparativism, advocating for an understanding of dual symbolic classifications that transcend cultural differences. Ultimately, "Counterpoints" serves as a critical examination of how oppositional thinking shapes human understanding and cultural interpretation, inviting readers to reconsider simplistic anthropological assumptions.
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Subject Terms
Counterpoints by Rodney Needham
First published: 1987
Type of work: Cultural anthropology
Form and Content
Counterpoints is both a study of the concept of opposition (exemplified by pairs of terms such as black/white, woman/man, left/right) and a reply to the author’s critics. British social anthropologist Rodney Needham contends that what is meant by “opposition” must be reexamined before the term can be employed as an analytical tool in ethnography (the scientific study of individual cultures). Far from being a precise, fundamental, and utterly simple way of ordering the world, the concept is exceedingly complex, imprecise, and ambiguous. Though virtually every culture on earth has produced its own groupings of opposing pairs of terms (or dyads), there is no a priori notion of the meaning of “opposite” that will yield the dyads used in a given culture, or even explain their relationships in lists brought back by researchers.
This is not to deny that the human mind has a proclivity to order the world in binary terms (us/them, inside/outside, earth/sky, sun/moon), but Needham maintains that the presence of such a proclivity in widely divergent societies indicates not the working of some formal concept generating such terms but the working of a human tendency toward metaphorical thought. Such thought produces images of opposites based on “a vectorial intuition of relative locations in space.” That is, the relationships of up to down, or right to left, give rise, by means of metaphor, to images irreducible to spatial direction (king/subjects, ideal/real, culture/nature) but analogous (up is to down as king is to subject).
A Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, Needham presented the substance of Counterpoints as a series of lectures for the university in 1984. The book’s 250 pages, divided into nine chapters, examine the idea of opposition (or polarity), beginning with a disarming consideration of the various opposites implied in a Saul Steinberg cartoon which appeared on the cover of The New Yorker on May 25, 1963. This leads to lexical exploration of the derivation of the word “opposite” and the apparent universality of the concept, even in languages that are not Indo-European. Next, Needham successively considers Aristotle’s attempt to formalize the idea of opposition, lexicologist C. K. Ogden’s “improvement,” and what part another concept, that of complementarity, might play in the analysis. Chapters 7 and 8, constituting roughly a third of the book, are technical appraisals of the work of French anthropologists Louis Dumont and Serge Tcherkezoff and their challenge to Needham’s own theory of opposition, which is presented in the final chapter.
A helpful bibliography, an index, and several diagrams and tables make Counterpoints an appropriate starting point for the consideration of theories of opposition. Though most chapters stand on their own, the infighting in chapters 7 and 8 is mostly pedantic; nevertheless, the work is the product of a mature scholar in command of a wide variety of materials.
Critical Context
Counterpoints is an elaboration of the author’s Reconnaissances (1980), a collection of three essays delivered at the University of Toronto in 1978. The central essay, “Analogical Classification,” is a presentation of Needham’s diagram of proportional analogy, but leaves open the question of the nature of opposition. As in his other works, such as Belief, Language, and Experience (1972), Circumstantial Deliveries (1981), and Against the Tranquility of Axioms (1983), Needham challenges the conventional wisdom of narrow ethnographic projects that tend to emphasize differences among cultures rather than commonalities. As an exponent of comparativism, Needham believes that empirical analysis can further the understanding of not only “opposition” but also other ideas such as “belief” and “analogy,” leading perhaps to an understanding of the universal prevalence of dual symbolic classification in human society. Needham says that the tendency to produce dual classificatory schemes is innate in human beings and that comparativism can bring such a proclivity to light. Such comparativism is in the tradition, if not the substance, of the founder of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim. In addition, Needham has modified the structuralism of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to suit his own British empiricist tradition; thus, Needham’s interpretation of opposition not only uses philosophical and linguistic insights but also is heavily dependent on field research findings.
Critics argue that Needham has reached a dead end in his analysis, in his apparent refusal to embrace the comparativism of modern cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and what these sciences may say about the makeup of the mind or brain.
Nevertheless, through hundreds of articles published in anthropological journals and in his many books, Rodney Needham has called into question simplistic anthropological relativism and has maintained that “a conceptual scheme, expressing constant semantic values and accompanied by characteristic imagery, can be securely established on a global scale; also that the significant structure thus determined can be a reliable instrument in the interpretation of further ethnographical cases.”
Bibliography
Byerly, H.C. Review in Choice. XXV (December, 1987), p. 636.
Lloyd, G.E.R. Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought, 1966.
Needham, Rodney. Exemplars, 1985.
Needham, Rodney. Symbolic Classification, 1979.
Needham, Rodney, ed. Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification, 1973.
Pocock, David. “Cleaning and Sharpening,” in The Times Literary Supplement. December 4-10, 1987, p. 1356.