Key points
Culture as symbols and meanings
Symbolic and interpretive anthropology reacted against dry structural-functional lists and hard materialism: the task is to understand meanings people attach to symbols and actions.
- Culture is a system of symbols that guides behaviour because people share interpretations.
- Shift from macro structure/function toward actor-centred meaning in context.
- Two streams: interpretive (Geertz — symbols as vehicles of meaning) and symbolic-processual (Turner — symbols as operators in ritual and conflict).
Earlier systemic approaches
- Society-centred structure/function
- Culture as adaptive or need-meeting system
- Generalising science ambition
Symbolic / interpretive
- Actor-centred meaning
- Culture as texts and symbols
- Interpretation within local context
Thinker
Clifford Geertz — thick description and deep play
- Influences: Weberian Verstehen (understand from the actor’s viewpoint) and hermeneutics (interpretation in context).
- Culture: historically transmitted patterns of meaning embodied in symbols.
- Thick description: not only what happened, but what it meant to participants — a wink is not a blink.
- Balinese cockfight (‘Deep Play’): not mere gambling; a story people tell themselves about status, masculinity, rivalry and hierarchy; higher stakes deepen symbolic load.
- Religion as a system of symbols establishing moods and motivations; helps people cross thresholds of unreason, suffering and evil by giving meaning, not always by removing pain.
- Javanese funeral episode: when political factions invade a rite, shared meanings break and the funeral becomes a political symbol — thick description captures the shift.
Thinker
Victor Turner — ritual, symbols and social drama
- Symbols maintain order, create meaning and guide action; they are multivocal (many meanings), condense many themes, and polarise sensory/emotional versus ideological poles.
- Ndembu Mudyi tree: white latex links motherhood, matriliny, learning and community — one object, many voices.
- Social drama: breach → crisis → redress → reintegration or recognition of schism.
- Liminality: in-between phase of rites of passage when normal status is suspended; communitas — intense unstructured fellowship among liminal persons.
- Rituals do not only mirror structure; they can remake solidarity after conflict.
Thinker
David Schneider — kinship as a cultural system
- David Schneider (1918–1995) argued that kinship is a system of symbols, not a map of biology. Blood and law are American cultural ideas, not universal nature.
- American Kinship treats ‘blood’ and ‘love/law’ as the two orders that Americans use to decide who counts as a relative.
- Yap (Micronesia): relatedness is built through feeding, work and obligation as much as through birth — the ethnographer who starts with genealogy misses the local theory.
- Failure of the genealogical method, in this reading, is a theoretical failure: it smuggles Euro-American biology into other people’s worlds.
- Place Schneider with Geertz (culture as symbols) rather than with Morgan’s kinship stages.
Examples
- Use Schneider when a question asks whether kinship is biology plus marriage rules, or a cultural definition of relatedness.
Critique
Limitations
- Risk of endless interpretation without causal explanation.
- Material constraints and political economy can be underplayed.
- Schneider’s American case is a method warning, not a claim that biology never matters.
- Still essential for answering ‘what does this mean to them?’ in Mains answers.
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