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Symbolic Anthropology

Symbolic anthropology (otherwise known as Interpretive anthropology) is an umbrella school that includes those anthropologists who stress culture as meaning, expressed through symbolic means. In many ways the movement took hold in reaction to what was being argued as the sterile scientism of both ecological materialist approaches and cognitive (modeling) approaches. The conceptualization of culture as symbolic implies an interpretive approach from the "natives point of view". Generally speaking, symbolic anthropologists agreed on certain principals: Symbols carried multiple meanings. Symbols were used and created in public, social exchanges. The identification of cultural life requires isolating symbols, identifying their meanings, and showing how they resonate within a specific dynamic cultural context. However, there still existed several variants of the symbolic approach. The three most common stem from the works of Clifford Geertz, Harold Schneider, and Victor Turner.

Geertz's symbolic anthropology (often termed "semiotic approach") was influenced by Max Weber and Talcott Parson. He saw symbols as vehicles of culture, in that symbols transmit meaning and communicate ways in which people should see, feel, and think about the world. Culture, in his sense, is not locked up in the heads of individuals but is embodied publicly through an organized collection of symbolic systems which produce worldview, ethos, shared values, etc. Unlike Victor Turner, Geertz was not very interested in the practical social effects of symbols but rather deciphering which acts were symbols (in the imaginative universe of the people) and how they shape the way people think and communicate about the world, how they influence personhood and social relations. Geertz approach to culture is detailed in his famous piece "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture"(1973). He provides the example of the wink versus the twitch, both similar physiological movements but distinguished by the fact that the twitch has no meaning while the wink has multiple possible meanings to be unraveled through anthropologists employment of interpretive thick description.

Victor Turner, on the other hand, was less interested in symbols as windows into the integrated ethos and worldview of society but was interested in symbols as operators of the social process. His focus was on the pragmatics of symbols, that is, how symbols operate as active forces in social processes. Coming out of the Manchester school as a student of Max Gluckman, Turner's interests focused on the ways in which societies coped with internal contradiction and disharmony. Turner saw symbols and symbolic action as the important means by which societies maintained solidarity. Symbols have the ability to move actors from different statuses, solidify relationships, resolve contradictions, and create social norms. Turner's most famous work was on the ritual practices of Ndembu society (1967) where he developed his theories of "liminality" and "communitas", states in which the structured and hierarchical society was symbolically transformed into an egalitarian community.

Harold Schneider's approach to symbolic anthropology focused on more systematic aspects of culture. He argued that anthropologists, particularly in the context of kinship studies, were really practicing sociology and had lost touch with the concept of culture altogether. He believed that the cultural system was defined by the internal logic of systems of symbols and meanings, which he termed "core symbols." This cultural system informs and gives shape to abstract norms, which, in turn, inform observable behavior. For Schneider, culture is a single system that should not be separated into sociological domains such as economics, politics, kinship, etc.

Definitions:

Geertz:
"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himslef has spun, I take cultures to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."(1973:5)

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