Clifford Geertz (Interpretation of Cultures) and the Social Const ruation of Meaning

Clifford Geertz (Interpretation of Cultures) and the Social Const ruation of Meaning

Dr. Geertz's landmark contributions to social and cultural theory have been influential not only among anthropologists, but also among geographers, ecologists, political scientists, humanists, and historians. According to Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), human intelligence evolved during the last Ice Age. [1] The culminating phase of human biological evolution was intimately intertwined with the development of language and other basic forms of culture. This is based on the evidence of the rapid development of human brain capacity as well as the beginnings of evidence of human symbolic activity such as ritual burials. This impetus for this rapid evolution appears to be the development of the capacity for symbolic communication. We evolved our large cerebral cortex in order to communicate.

The Pleistocene period, with its rapid and radical variations in climate, land formations, and vegetation, has long been recognized to be a period in which conditions were ideal for the speedy and efficient evolutionary development of man; now it seems also to have been a period in which a cultural environment increasingly supplemented the natural environment in the selection process so as to further accelerate the rate of hominid evolution to an unprecedented speed. [2] The Ice Age appears not to have been merely a time of receding brow ridges and shrinking jaws, but a time in which were forged early all those characteristics of man's existence which are most graphically human: his thoroughly encephelated nervous system, his incest-taboo-based social structure, and his capacity to create and use symbols. The fact that these distinctive features of humanity emerged together in complex interaction with one another rather than serially as so long supposed is of exceptional importance in the interpretation of human mentality, because it suggests that man's nervous system does not merely enable him to acquire culture, it positively demands that he do so if it is going to function at all. . . .A cultureless human being would probably turn out to be not an intrinsically talented though unfulfilled ape, but a wholly mindless and consequently unworkable monstrosity. [3]

Culture as a symbolic medium of communication is neither static nor homogeneous. But it is shared, that is to say, it is intersubjective in character . On other words is is culture is a function of social interaction. Knowledge is a function of the coordinated activity of multiple nervous systems or subjectivities, not the the private property of the individual nervous system or subjectivity. Thinking came along as a necessary element of the communication process. For this reason Geertz affirms that "Human thought is consummately social: social in its origins, social in its functions, social in its form, social in its applications" [3].

This intersubjectivity must be understood from two perspectives: the anthropological and the psychological. From an anthropological perspective, culture is the sum total of society's symbolic operating systems and the basis for its ecological adaptation to ...