ABSTRACT
If every society or culture has its own set of symbols, as anthropologists have demonstrated, one may expect the symbols of a preindustrial society to differ very markedly from those of a society of industrial kind. The case for some symbolic universals has been made - or at least for some symbolic general ideas - as in the status significance of up-and-down or right-and-left; the sexual significance of water or hair, or pointed and cleft objects; the emotional significance in the contrast of light and dark colours and the stimulus of red. Examples of all of this can be found in nearly any pre-industrial society that has been reasonably well studied. But a pre-industrial society tends to have a smaller range of man-made objects to get symbolic about. In the relative absence of machinery its members tend to be less concerned with symbolic problems of alienation of man from the products of his labour. With one major product then, food, should we expect to find it embedded to a high or to a low degree in the symbolic system of the society?
