“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs.”

                                                          ----- Clifford Geertz[1]

Biography[2]:

“I want to do more, attempt to use some of the techniques that literary critics use, that historians use, that philosophers use, to explicate cultural matters.”

         Anthropologists are “merchants of astonishment”, wrote Clifford Geertz in Available Light, Anthropological reflections on Philosophical Topics (2000).  Clifford Geertz first studied anthropology in Harvard University. Geertz first attended school in Antioch College in Ohio. He began college as an English major and a writer and only tried Anthropology at a suggestion of a teacher. Geertz and his wife were both accepted at Harvard to study Social Relations as they wanted to pursue their degrees in Anthropology.

         After two years of studying, he began work on his first project, Rim rock, located in the southwest United States. While there he studied drought death and the effects of alcohol on the five cultures were in the region. After he was done with the study, he wrote his first professional article. When his first project ended, he was given the opportunity to go to Indonesia with his wife. While in Indonesia he studied religion while his wife studied kinship and family.

       When Clifford returned from Indonesia, he wrote his first book, Agricultural Involution. It describes the two main kinds of agriculture in Indonesia, Swidden and Sawah (irrigated rice paddy fields), and their geographical localization. It also describes the historical development of Indonesian agriculture by developing the hypothesis that existing forms of agriculture were intensified instead of changed. Since then, Geertz has published over a dozen books.

               Geertz is known for breaking away from the 1950s emphasis on scientistic inquiry and for introducing a more metaphorical and literary style to the discipline of anthropology.[3] Geertz is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and scholarly awards, the author of twelve books, and the co-author and editor of a number of others. He received the National Book Critics Circle Prize for criticism in 1989 for WORKS AND LIVES: THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS AUTHOR (1988). He is a member of the advisory board of the ANTIOCH REVIEW and a frequent contributor to THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. Geertz's field work has taken him to Java, Bali, Celebes, and Sumatra in Indonesia as well as to Morocco. In May 2000, he was honored at "Cultures, Sociétiés, et Territoires: Hommage à Clifford Geertz," a conference held in Sefrou, Morocco. It was particularly gratifying, commented Geertz, because "Anthropologists are not always welcomed back to the site of their field studies."

        Geertz is now Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey. His ideas have found favor among other anthropologists and other sciences. His work serves society by providing "a more realistic and less platonic view of other cultures." His goal has never been to perpetuate a specific methodology, but to "set a tone or mood or agenda that people could react toward or against." 

 GEERTZ: AIMS AND BELIEFS

          If Geertz is not a "relativist" (as this term is sometimes used), his pluralism, his appreciation of differences, contrasts, conflict, among cultures is refined to an unusual degree, so that at times he seems almost to be on the lookout for them…. As he wrote some years ago, "the essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others … have given.”[4]

        Clifford Geertz is credited as one of the principal Symbolic Anthropologists. He researched and examined the meaning of cultural behaviors by his interpretations. Geertz viewed culture as an organized collection of symbolic system. He saw people’s cultural behaviors based on these signs and symbols. With a reference to socially established signs and symbols, people shape the patterns of their behaviors and give meanings to their experiences. In other words, people rely on meanings in order to sustain their social life. According to Geertz, “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs.”

        Geertz believed that each culture is unique and refused to seek universal laws among different cultures. Therefore the task of anthropology is to figure out signs and symbols in a specific society and to sort them out according to their significance. This method requires anthropologists to read meanings not only as the native people do but also beyond that level. The goal of this method is to determine the patterns of meanings in the society and make people’s behaviors interpretable to outsiders. This method implies that anthropologists are intercultural translators who use ethnography to convey the meanings of different cultures. He contends that he is not interested in perpetuating a specific methodology, but rather “setting a tone or mood or agenda that people could react toward or against.”

          Geertz aims to provide social science with and understanding and appreciation of “thick description.” While Geertz applies thick description in the direction of anthropological study (specifically his own ‘interpretive anthropology’), his theory that asserts the essentially semiotic nature of culture has implications for the social sciences in general and, in our case, political science (and comparative political science) in particular.

         “Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is… There are a number of ways of escaping this—turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and toying with it. But they are escapes. The fact is that to commit oneself to a semiotic concept of culture and an interpretive approach to the study of it is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as… ‘essentially contestable.’ Anthropology, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of the consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other.”[5]

INTRODUCTION

         The concept of the interpretation of cultures in anthropology is primarily associated with the work of Clifford Geertz. His collection of essays of the same name has become an indispensable reading for most of the anthropology courses throughout the world (Geertz 1973). It has also become a starting point for what is being referred to as “postmodern ethnography”. On the more personal level, it is Geertz’s ideas and interpretations which provoked me to do research and come out with this paper, which opened up a whole new set of perspectives for me, both within the field of anthropology and outside of it. I could say that it made me choose such an interesting topic as something I wanted to do. At least for the time being.

         In this paper I intend to outline some of the directions that his work opens, as well as some questions that might be looked at from different perspective, taking into account the “interpretive” or “literary” turn in contemporary anthropology. I regard Geertz as the “primary mover” behind these relatively recent trends, and his approach (especially regarding “reading cultures”, where, strictly speaking, he follows upon the brilliant late 19th /early 20th century German tradition of Verstehen, primarily by Max Weber) opens up numerous possibilities for the anthropological work in the contemporary world. It also opens possibilities for re-examination of the anthropological praxis and the ways in which anthropologists have been interpreting the world.

         Due to the constraints of time and scarcity of resources the present paper is purely based on web search and internet search.

CHAPTER-1

THE IDEA OF “CULTURE”          

         The term culture can be used to refer collectively to a society and its way of life or in reference to human culture as a whole. Culture is a term used in confusing and contradictory ways. From an anthropological perspective, there can be no youth culture or media culture. Here are some definitions of the term which reflect how it is used in this course. The Modern technical definition of culture, as socially patterned human thought and behavior, was originally proposed by Edward Tylor[6]. He said that, "Culture taken, in its wide ethnographic sense is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action".[7]

         Arnold[8] saw culture--"contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world" -- as the crucial component of a healthy democratic state. Arnold's view of culture as involving such characteristics as "beauty," "intelligence," and "perfection" is a Neoplatonic one -- that is, it tends to assume that these values exist in the abstract and are the same for all human societies. His argument, then, is openly political: he feels that if more people will share and pursue his notions of beauty, truth, and perfection--of culture--that the world will be a better place.  And according to Raymond Williams[9], the culture is ordinary. Williams here "forced the first important shift into a new way of thinking about the symbolic[10] dimensions of our lives. Thus, 'culture' is wrested from that privileged space of artistic production and specialist knowledge [e.g. "high culture"[11]], into the lived experience of the everyday"

        The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would consider all this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all.

         But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it, come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As in the first view of it [ie. the view associated with science/curiosity], we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words: "To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the second view of it [ie. Arnold's view], there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God prevail!" The moment culture is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn about the universal order, but as the endeavor, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest. 

CLASSIC DEFINITIONS OF CULTURE:

         Culture is a term used in confusing and contradictory ways. From an anthropological perspective, there can be no youth culture or media culture. Here are some definitions of the term which reflect how it is used in this course.

        "Culture taken, in its wide ethnographic sense is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action".[12]

        Culture is "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life"[13].

       "A society's culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believes in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members".[14]

       Culture consists of "learned systems of meaning, communicated by means of natural language and other symbol systems, having representational, directive, and affective functions, and capable of creating cultural entities and particular senses of reality"[15].

      Culture is "an extra somatic (nongenetic, nonbodily), temporal continuum of things and events dependent upon symboling. Culture consists of tools, implements, utensils, clothing, ornaments, customs, institutions, beliefs, rituals, games, works of art, language, etc”.[16]

CHAPTER-2

CLIFFORD GEERTZ’S CONCEPT OF CULTURE:

        Culture is "a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life".[17] 

         In attempting to lay out the various meanings attached to the word "culture" Clifford Geertz refers to the important anthropological work by Clyde kluckhohn, in which the following meanings are suggested:

Clyde provides us with the following potential meanings of “culture” [18]:

1. "the total way of life of a people"

2. "the social legacy the individual acquires from his group"

3. "a way of thinking, feeling, and believing"

4. "an abstraction from behavior"

5. “a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave”

6. "a storehouse of pooled learning"

7. "a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems"

8. "learned behavior"

9. “a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior”

10. “a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men"

11. "a precipitate of history"

12. a behavioral map, sieve, or matrix.

        Essentially, there is no standard and it will eventually be “necessary to choose.” Geertz himself argues for a “semiotic”[19] concept of culture: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical.”

         "The concept of culture I espouse. . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after. . . .

        Geertz compares the methods of an anthropologist analyzing culture to those of a literary critic analyzing a text: "sorting out the structures of signification. . . and determining their social ground and import. . . . Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct a reading of') a manuscript. . . ."

        Once human behavior is seen as . . . symbolic action--action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies--the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense. The thing to ask [of actions] is what their import is".

       Geertz argues that culture is "public because meaning is"--systems of meaning are necessarily the collective property of a group. When we say we do not understand the actions of people from a culture other than our own, we are acknowledging our "lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs.

CHAPTER-3

GEERTZ ON RELIGION

         The approach of Clifford Geertz is that of the interpretive sociology/anthropology broadly in the tradition of Weber, and he is mainly concerned about interpreting and providing a "thick" description of cultural systems so that they can be apprehended by those who are not insiders to that cultural system. Here, Geertz's task is to develop a theory of religion based on the view that it is distinctively a part of the cultural system. He laments the fact that sociological theorizing on religion has not really advanced at all since the works of "four big men" of Durkheim, Weber, Freud and Malinowski, and asserts that in order to advance the theoretical understanding of religion one needs to broadly encompass different frameworks provided by these different theorists and advance them in a coherent fashion. Now, in order to analyze religion as a cultural system, one first needs the working definition of the term culture. Geertz defines this term as "a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life".

         In developing a theory of religion as a cultural system, Geertz starts right out by first providing the definition of religion at the onset. Religion is defined as (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic (p. 90). He then goes on to expound more fully on each of the five parts of the definition in some detail.

(1)

The first important characteristic of the system of symbols, or in another word the cultural patterns, is that they are the extrinsic source of information. By "extrinsic" it is meant that this source of information results out of cultural constructs, and not innate or genetic characteristics of human beings. The other important point is that this system of symbols is the "model" for empirical reality, in a dual sense. That is, it has the aspects of being "model of" and "model for" reality - model of, in the sense that it helps people apprehend what is the nature of true reality by providing the graspable depiction of that reality, and model for, in the sense that the model also has the function of actually determining people's actions by providing for the blueprints of how things are ought to be conducted. This point is particularly important, for it touches on the same issue of the dialect between structure and actions mentioned in point #2. Geertz says: "Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves".

(2)

Religion establishes certain dispositions in people, that is, they do not cause certain activities or occurrences to take place directly, but increases the probability of certain activities or occurrences taking place. He made distinction between moods and motivations. Briefly, the difference is that whereas motivations have certain ends in conception and are defined according to that ends they conduce, moods go nowhere and are rendered meaningful only according to the source of that "mood" but not ends they pursue.

(3)

Religion, if it is not to be a mere jumbled collection of moralisms, must affirm something; and it must affirm that life we live in is comprehensible, that we are not living in total chaos in which everything is incomprehensible. There are three spheres of life that this threshold of comprehensibility may be broken, and life may come to be seen as incomprehensible: in terms of analytic capacities, in terms of endurance, and in terms of moral insight - which religious systems in turn have to make sure that this threshold is not broken and the life is made meaningful. Or, in another word, the analytic capacity problem may be seen as accounting for the events seen as odd, strange or uncanny; endurance problems may be seen as accounting for the problem of suffering, and moral insight problems may be seen as accounting for the problem of evil. In all of them, the key idea is that religion does not try to directly deny the existence or the reality of undeniable problems, but rather that religion merely tries to deny the notion that there is not any way that these problems may be accounted for in some way.

(4)

But how do people come to accept, believe in, this denial of the notion that nothing can be accounted for, in another word, how do people come to accept the world view presented by religion? Geertz' basic answer seems to be that people come to accept this by doing - acting out and participating in religious rituals. In another word, for the participants in religious rituals, religious rituals are not merely the model of reality but also the model for reality. That is, not only religion depicts what they already believe, but it also sets example in what to believe and is therefore the enactments, materializations, and the realizations of certain belief systems.

(5)

The power of religion largely stems from its ability to act upon and transform people's conceptions of the everyday, common-sense world. That is, the moods and motivations induced by religion seem so powerful to believers that only they seem to be the sensible version of what things "really are" - and thus when people move out of the world of religious rituals and back into the common sense world it is the latter that is altered. Further, another important point Geertz makes here is that just how each different religious systems act upon the everyday world is entirely particularistic and there is no one single functional assessment of religions that can tell whether religion is good or bad, or whether it is functional to the society or not.

Geertz’s “Models of-Models for” :[20]

         Clifford Geertz, posits a cultural dynamic, which he refers to as "models of--models for."[21] The specific context for the discussion of this process is its function within religion, but the general application is readily apparent for explaining the compelling nature of other perspectives found in most overarching narratives such as philosophy or science.

         Geertz grounds his presentation of religion as a cultural process in Max Weber's concept of the “Problem of Meaning”. The Problem of Meaning (how do we deal with events not easily explained, in fact, often unexplainable) creates in an individual and society the threat of chaos. This feeling of chaos creates three states which individuals find intolerable-- analytic, emotional, and moral impotence. It is Geertz's contention that religion is born out of humanity's attempt to deal with the problem of meaning by "affirming, or at least recognizing the inescapability of ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole". Geertz's discussion of this impetus, as well as his analysis of the actual dynamics at work in the process of religion, shed an interesting light on other cultural systems which seem to compel humanity with the same degree of fervor and need.

        The aspect of religion which Geertz sees as the synthesizing agent for this process for dealing with the Problem of Meaning is what he calls the religious perspective, one of four perspectives humans use to make sense of their lives. The other three are the commonsense, scientific, and aesthetic perspectives.  Geertz holds that the religious perspective arises from humanity's understanding that the other three fall short of dealing with the threat of chaos. "Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all.......challenges with which any religion, however 'primitive,' that hope to persist must attempt to cope."

         To understand how this perspective is generated, it becomes important to look at Geertz's definition of religion. Religion is "...a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men [sic] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic". Of particular interest is Geertz's explanation of the term symbols as the vehicles for these conceptions; i.e., objects, actions, or ideas, which help a society, bring their culture into focus. These symbols work in conjunction with one another to create cultural patterns. It is the nature of these patterns to be not just extrinsic sources of information but also shapers of that information. This dual aspect of cultural patterns is, then, what Geertz means by models of--models for. This paired function becomes clearer as Geertz explains the dual nature of an individual's awareness of the world; that is, that there is a "world as it is" and a "world as it should be." The terms Geertz uses for these two awarenesses are worldview ("the collection of notions a people have about how reality really is") and ethos ("the general lifestyle, how people like to do things"). The point then is that one's worldview is always seen against a sense of one's ethos and vice versa. In humbler tones, our sense of the everyday is coloured by the sense of an ideal, which in turn is shaped by the everyday. 

         Through the ability of cultural patterns to be both models of and models for, one’s worldview and ethos are brought together. They are fused into what Geertz calls the "really real," which is created by "…the imbuing of a certain complex of symbols—of the metaphysics they formulate and the style of life which they recommend—with a persuasive authority which, from an analytic point of view is the essence of religious perspective". That is, these symbol systems make the ethos intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life adapted to the worldview, and to make the worldview emotionally convincing by being presented as an image well suited to accommodate such a way of life. Geertz likens this to hanging a picture up on a nail hammered into its own frame, an image which gives one a sense of why people have so much trouble seeing and understanding other worldviews. At heart, then, the religious perspective is the conviction that the values one holds are grounded in the inherent structure of reality, that there is an inner connection with the way one ought to live and the way things really are. Experiences, which are contained in the religious perspective, as Geertz puts it, come to "haunt our daily life and cast indirect light on it". Therefore some of the more important effects of the religious perspective come through a redefinition of our daily life in light of these remembered experiences. 

CHAPTER-4

GEERTZ’ STUDY OF BALINESE COCKFIGHTS[22]

         The pre-eminent example of the symbolic interpretation of collective group behavior is Clifford Geertz’ hermeneutic study of Balinese cockfights. On one level, cockfights are about betting on which of two chickens armed with razor-sharp leg spurs will first succeed in hacking the other to bits. On another level, cockfights are collective efforts to organize and imaginatively actualize Balinese' perceptions about themselves and their social world. In Balinese cockfights, according to Geertz, "it is only apparently cocks that are fighting.... Actually, it is men." This identification of Balinese men with their fighting cocks is complex. On the one hand, cocks represent the ideal male ego, "ambulant penises" as Geertz puts it. On the other hand, cocks are in fact animals. And for the Balinese, animals and their own animal nature produce both feelings of revulsion--witness the practice of filing children's teeth so as not to look like fangs--and supernatural fear, since animals are associated with demons and the powers of darkness. Thus, " i n the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death." As social phenomena, cockfights are highly structured events.[23] Just as the cocks are a metaphor for their owners, the structure of the human performance in these events is a metaphor for Balinese society. The owners of the opposing cocks and the coalition of supporters betting on those cocks always coincide with opposing factions in the social structure. Likewise, the betting by non-owners that accompanies every cockfight is done strictly according to factional affiliation. The groups represented and the category of allies and opponents changes from match to match. In a fight between representatives of two kin groups, the opposition follows kin group lines, whereas in a fight between owners who come from different villages, one's allegiance depends on one's village. In all cases, the pattern of betting reflects larger societal divisions. How one bets, therefore, is determined by who you are, rather than by your estimation of the likelihood that one or another of the two birds will come out alive.
         Given the metaphorical significance of the cocks as the alter egos of their owners, and the metaphorical character of the betting as a microcosm of society, it is readily apparent that the cockfight is not about either cocks or money. Rather, it "is fundamentally a dramatization of status concerns." And in Bali," status is all," or nearly all.[24]

         Although an obsession with status permeates all aspects of Balinese social life, overt expression of interpersonal and inter group conflicts is suppressed by an equally obsessive concern with maintaining the appearance of social harmony. In the guise of a fight between chickens, important aspects of everyday experience, such as masculinity, animal aggression, personal prestige and intergroup rivalry, are given open expression.

        The cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and been reduced ... to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived.... An image, fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them ... but, in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them.
         But cockfights are more than simply acting out of Balinese ideas about status. In part through their symbolic expression in cockfights those ideas come into being, not as ideas, but as descriptions of reality. Like other symbolic action, "cockfights are not merely reflections of a preexisting sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in the creation and maintenance of such a sensibility." Through them the Balinese simultaneously form their own temperaments and the temper of society, or at least a facet of each. In this way "the inner becomes outer, and the subjective world picture becomes a social reality."

         The significance of Geertz' article is not in what it says about the substance of Balinese views about status, but as an illustration of the way formal, symbolic expression of abstract ideas formulates those ideas as social reality. Just as cockfights are not merely amusement, trials cannot be completely understood from the perspective of their practical significance alone. Our law courts simply have not become the passionless, routinized, matter-of-fact institutions that a bureaucratic instrumental justification suggests. Just as cockfights adhere to formal rules that seem superfluous to their patent function as entertainment and spectacle, our judicial procedures are "elaborated with what seem to be digressions, formulae and formalisms," that are difficult to explain by reference to their explicit practical purposes alone. And in the same way that cockfights display and give reality to Balinese views about themselves and their social world, trials depict and thereby validate assumptions about the nature of fact and the authority of law on which the legitimacy of the practice depends. The process, in effect, proves its own premises.

AN EPILOGUE

         This person is very much like a root of a tree who gave a new look and new way of seeing this world and human beings.  He opened the doors of “Culture”, a new arena which was not at all given importance, for the future coming anthropologists to think and expand this particular area of Anthropology.

        The main difficulty in the completion of this project was the lack of resources, which made me to rely wholly on web and internet sites. Though the articles lacked the quality of materials, I have been successful in completing this project in time and had been able to introduce this atlantic person and his magnificent works to the outer world. I would like to sum up by explaining his ideas in brief.      

       In sum, Geertz wants us to appreciate that social actions are larger than themselves; they speak to larger issues, and vice versa, because, they are made to. It is not against a body of un-interpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers. We seek to converse with subjects in foreign cultures, gain access to their conceptual world; this is the goal of the semiotic approach to culture. Cultural theory is not its own master. At the end of the project, we must appreciate that the generality thick description contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstractions…The essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them. Cultural theory is not predictive; at best, it anticipates. Finally, our double task is to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts, the ‘said’ of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in those terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinates of human behavior. In ethnography, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself—that is, about the role of culture in human life—can be expressed.