A Study On Beer As A Functional And Situatiobal Thing

The study of material culture is a hotspot of anthropology,and semiotics has also long been concerned with the symbolic study of things.How to combine the two theoretical perspectives of anthropological and semiotic studies of things to examine the life history of the thing itself has become the foothold and focus of this doctoral thesis.This thesis refers to the thing of investigation under the combination of anthropology and semiotics as "the language of thing".Any material cultural phenomenon is the result of the mutual construction of the two forces that things show themselves to people and people show themselves to things.In this dual manifestation,symbols,especially linguistic symbols,are not only an intermediary but also a way of constructing the relationship between people and things.Therefore,any material activity is intertwined with symbolic activities,and it is the construction of the interaction between words and things.This thesis defines "the language of thing" as the construction of the relationship between words and things.Therefore,the language of thing includes two basic ways of symbolization:(1)Functional Thing,which is the material cultural activity more subject to the activity of the word.For example,the production of Lager beer is subject to a set of standardized,conceptual scientific and technical discourses,where thing acts as the referential functional units in this system.(2)Situational Thing,represents the process of the life activity of the thing itself takes precedence over the control of the scientific and technical discourse.For example,the production of Ale beer is more focused on localized natural conditions,and is more influenced by the experience on brewing.Situational thing can't exist independently of words,but in the way of symbolization,things are personally appearing,or self-speaking,so that people are not the endorsers of things but merely tellers.Therefore,the study of "biography of things" in anthropology is a kind of writing of "first name and second thing":firstly,facing the thing,then "listening" to it and making a biography.Relatively speaking,semiotics pays more attention to the control of words on material cultural activities,that is,functional things;anthropology is more concerned with the self-speaking of things,that is,situational things.More often than not,the study of semiotics and the anthropology is isolated from each other.Therefore,this thesis attempts to bridge this isolation,and use the concept of "the language of thing"to unify the functional thing and situational thing,and consider that they are two internal symbolizations of "the language of thing".In this way,they are mutually different and cross each other,overlapping,and transforming.This thesis attempts to use the material cultural phenomenon of beer as an entry point to analyze the "the language of thing".In the semiotics,there are three kinds of writings:The first is meta-language writing,which is discussed as a concept under purely theoretical speculation.The second is textual writing,which describes the symbolic activities of a specific language under the conditions of written text and literature.The third is to describe the symbolic activities of a certain language in the field of writing,that is,under the conditions of field investigation.This thesis combines these three writing methods.The "Introduction" part focuses on the meta-language writing,then first to the sixth chapter is the textual writing of the beer,and the seventh and eighth chapters are the presence writing of Tsingtao Beer.This thesis believes that a good anthropological material culture research should be the organic whole of these three writing balances.However,limited to the level of personal knowledge and professional limitations,more for meta-language writing and textual writing,field writing is relatively weak.If there is a certain emphasis in this thesis,it is that the author pays more attention to how beer,as a material language,to be written and constructed by two symbolic activities:situational and functional.At present,the mainstream of anthropology,biography writing,focuses more on the description of the specific content of material culture,rather than on how things are written and how things are symbolically constructed.The thesis is divided into four parts.The first part is the introduction.It mainly introduces the reason of the topic selection,reviews,the main contents of the anthropology,the research methods,contents of the semiotics,the related literatures of beer research,and outlines the basic situation of Qingdao in the fieldwork.The second part includes chapters one through six,which is the writing of "functionality".Through the combing and research of the literature,describe the beer as a story to study how to be constructed and evolved by two cultural methods-scenes and functions.The third part is the seven and eight chapters of this article,which is the writing of "situational thing".It is close to the traditional anthropological field notes,but there is a difference:the author carry out the fieldwork of Tsingtao beer,instead of using pure field vision to observe and describe Tsingtao beer,but regard Tsingtao beer as a situational symbol.I focus on the cultural significance of the beer:the situational thing and the functional thin?and apply the semiotic theory method to the fieldwork of anthropology.The fieldwork of Qingdao Beer Street and craft beer is a close observation of this cultural reconstruction trend.Finally,the conclusion part summarizes the whole thesis,points out that through the biographical writing of beer,try to explore a semiotie paradigm of the study of anthropology,and explore how to help this paradigm with functional and situational thing as the core of anthropological research.