The concept of Culture: Clifford Geertz's Notion of Symbolic and Interpretive Approach

 

Geertzian Way to Understand Culture:

To state simply, Clifford Geertz tried to understand the notion of culture with a symbolic and interpretive approach. Now, what is this approach all about? How exactly Geertz rationalize this approach to understand culture?  

According to Clifford Geertz, with a variety of proposed definitions, we have a broad concept of culture, which does not make any sense. It does not have any focus and when it loses its focus it does not become an operational concept. To make culture an operational concept we should make culture more focused definition of culture. And he approached it through his concept of culture as a system of symbols. So he reduced it from the distinction between non-material culture should be considered material or the non-material aspect or of this which is more important? He just moved away from this debate and he focused on looking at culture in terms of groups of symbols. This means the culture is the system of symbols and it is primarily a system of meanings, because the symbol is anything that has meanings, or certain ideas. So according to Clifford Geertz the concept of culture, is a system of meanings. This was his starting point. In technical terms, we can say for him the concept of culture is semiotic. The word here is semiotic, which means it is the study of meanings. It has to prove with meanings.

He says how we can reach the meaning? How can we understand meaning? So, he says anthropologists has always been in search of meanings, they always being trying to understand meanings and he raised a fundamental question that what anthropologists do? Anthropologists go to the field to study a particular community and write an account on them with ethnographic approach and the product we establish is ethnography. So, anthropologists write ethnography. In ethnography we try to see how people are going about their daily life, we try to understand what is the pattern of their behaviour, how they are behaving in daily life. In other words what we try to see is what people are doing? We try to understand what people are saying, how people are going about their everyday life. When we collect all these data, from that we abstract system of meanings occurred from the data which have been collected. From data we move to system of meanings. This system of meanings is not something that have been ascribed by the anthropologists rather it is the system of meaning which the people have with them, people give the meaning.

So interpretive approach is – an attempt to understand system of meanings which governs how people think, how people act and how people live. 

When we say that people think, people act or when we say the system of meanings, we are trying to make distinction between these things, it implies that these are somewhere not the same thing, there may be a distinction between the system of thinking and system of acting and between system of meanings. At some point there would be some distinctions. Only when we understand or presume that there is a distinction, then only we can study the system of meaning.