In some societies meanings arise from contextual relations rather than symbolic codes.

Evidence

There is nothing symbolic in this world. Gall is not associated with wormwood because it symbolises bitterness. It occurs itself as the trace of bitterness. The grain does not represent fertility, and therefore the woman. It is itself fertile, and duplicates in itself the swelling of a pregnant woman’s belly. Neither the grain nor the woman is merely a sign signifying the other and neither, it follows, has the status of the original, the ‘real’ referent or meaning of which the other would be merely the sign. These associations, in consequence, should not be explained in terms of any symbolic or cultural ‘code’, the separate realm to which we imagine such signs to belong. They arise entirely from their particular context, in the difference and similarity that produces context, and are as many and as varied as such contexts might be. This is something the notion of code, which by definition stands apart from context, can never contain. Thus gall, Bourdieu tells us, is associated with bitterness and therefore equivalent to wormwood, but also to oleander and to tar (and opposed, with these, to honey); in other contexts it is associated with greenness, and thus equivalent to lizards and to the colour green; and in still other contexts with anger (a quality inherent in the other two). Lizards, in turn, are associated with toads and thus with further qualities, and so on. Such resemblances and differences do not form a separate realm of meaning, a code apart from things themselves; hence this very notion of ‘thing’ does not occur. For the same reason, there is no ‘nature’ – in our own sense of the great referent, the signified in terms of which such a code is distinguished. There are, rather, the necessary relations at work in a world where nothing occurs except as something that resembles, differs from, duplicates or re-enacts something else. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s work on Kabyle symbolism; Mitchell is drawing on it here. Also relates to post-structuralist critiques of representational models. — connects to: Language enables conventions rather than being constituted by them. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 420; Meaning arises from interdependence in difference, not from data or content. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 622
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between contextual relation-based meaning and code-based meaning is a dense, paradigm-level distinction that resists summary.