Page 35 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

BINARY OPPOSITION

other. Similarly, between child and adult there is another ambiguous
category: youth. And between us and them there are deviants,
dissidents, and so on. Figure 1 offers a graphic presentation of the
concept.

Figure 1
The area of overlap shown in Figure 1 is, according to binary logic,
impossible. It is literally a scandalous category that ought not to exist.
In anthropological terms, the ambiguous boundary between two
recognised categories is where taboo can be expected. That is, any
activity or state that does not fit the binary opposition will be subject
to repression or ritual. For example, as the anthropologist Edmund
Leach (1976) suggests, the married and single states are binarily
opposed. They are normal, time-bound, central to experience and
secular. But the transition from one state to the other (getting married
or divorced) is a rite of passage between categories. It is abnormal, out
of time (the ‘moment of a lifetime’), at the edge of experience and, in
anthropological terms, sacred. The structural ambiguity of youth is one
reason why it is treated in the media as a scandalous category – it too is
a rite of passage and is subject to both repression and ritual.
News often structures the world into binarily opposed categories
(us : them). But it then faces the problem of dealing with people and
events that don’t fit neatly into the categories. The structural
ambiguity of home-grown oppositional groups and people offends
the consensual category of ‘us’, but cannot always be identified with
foreigners or ‘them’. In such cases, they are often represented as folk-
devils, or as sick, deviant or mad – that is, they are tabooed.
Binary oppositions are structurally related to one another. Binaries
function to order meanings, and you may find transformations of one
underlying binary running through a story. For instance, the binary
masculinity : femininity may be transformed within a story into a
number of other terms:

20