Another view of Culture: Clifford Geertz

Another view of culture is that of Clifford Geertz (1973, p 5) who claimed like Silverstein
that culture is a system of inherited conceptions , but the latter added that those cultural
conceptions were expressed in symbolical forms and they enabled men to communicate and
develop their knowledge and attitude about life. In fact, the function of culture is to impose
meaning on the world and make it understandable. In The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz
(1973) states that language and its uses within a group are of interest to social
anthropologists inasmuch as they are a significant part of human behaviour that represents
symbolic action in regard to the social structure and interactions within the group. He
further notes that behavior articulates culture and determines how language is used to
express meaning. In general terms, through the analyses of language uses, anthropologists
seek to gain access to cultural frameworks and thus acquire an understanding of the
conceptual world within which the members of the group live. Besides, according to his
culture theory, Richard Shweder (1984, p 16) delves into conceptual properties of culture
and cultural meaning systems as well as representations of self and manifestations of beliefs
and emotions. Because concepts, thoughts and identities are often expressed through
language, culture theory is also concerned with language acquisition and socialization within
a group. In light of Culture theory, language is regarded as a complex system that mirrors
what meanings are attached to behaviors and how they are expressed. In other words, and
as Dell Hymes (1974, p 54-55) put it:

Uses of language are inseparable from the society and identities and social meanings that
are encoded linguistically.

In all of the cultural theories above, you always have the relation of the language,
culture and group or society: the language is impregnated with the culture of the society,
reflect a cultural framework that includes the society’s values, beliefs, and ways of behaving
that are encoded within the language. It is this search for guidance, humans beings being in
need of symbolic sources to orient themselves to the system of meaning in a particular
culture. Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist, said that culture is made up of the meanings
people find to make sense of their lives and to guide their actions. This anthropologist saw
the task of interpretative anthropology as being fundamentally about getting some idea of
how people conceptualize, understand their world, what they are doing, how they are going
about doing it, to get an idea of their world. Geertz was in fact more concerned with overall
cultural operation. Like Max Weber, Clifford Geertz in his book The Interpretation of Cultures
(1973, p 5) thought 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’.

This definition of culture ‘inherited conceptions in symbolic forms by which men

communicate is the one espoused by the first recognized woman philosopher Suzanne
Langer in her book A New Key in which she clarifies that for her the concept is essentially a
semiotic one. Likewise, Clifford Geertz shares this same conception. For both Suzanne Langer
and Geertz, language is a series of inherited signs that encapsulates culture and the
meanings it gives on the world to make it understandable. A major definition given by
Clifford is that language and its uses are important to anthropologists inasmuch as they
throw light on man’s behaviour representing symbolic actions in the social structure and in
the social interactions within a group. It is from the behaviour of individuals that we
understand culture and it is from the language that we understand meaning. Generally it is
through the analyses of language uses that we can gain access to cultural frameworks and
consequently understand the conceptual world members of the group live in.