SHARED OBJECTIFICATION

Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology: Essay and Diagrams, Cambridge University Press, 1999

Even a pig is a complex sign, objectifying more than one relationship. So far I have not discussed the polysemous characteristic of objectifications and explained how this is dealt with in M. The principle adoped is that a unique objectification (a particular pig) objectifies a cluster of relationships which are themselves related. Thus we cannot envisage a situation in which X (object, sign-vehicle) objectifies, so to speak, two separate sets of relations which are only arbitrarily related via their shared objectification, X, as in the figure above. There will be a further relationship between the multiple relationships which one object objectifies. How to represent (or imagine) this?