Multiple levels of meaning and the tension of consciousness: How to interpretiron technology in Bantua Africa

When can we say that a Bantu smith knows the ‘meaning’ of iron smelting - only when he explicitly recognizes the underlying sexual structure of it or simply when he knows how to go on smithing? Is structuralist theory, which considers meaning as codic and diacritical, really incommensurable with a phenomenological view of meaning as something primarily experiential? In this posthumous paper, Stefan Bekaert argues that the differences between both perspectives are gradual rather than fundamental. Drawing on the sexual metaphors in Sakata iron technology, he presents a tentative scale of meaning levels: the level of typified experience, the level of pragmatic motive, the level of (meta)physical intervention, the level of experiential gestalt, the level of explicit metaphor, and the level of codic oppositions. Rejecting the ‘one-world-ism’ predominant in many social sciences, he argues that humans inhabit and draw on many worlds at once. (DVR)