The Interpretation of Cultures

“As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described.”

Here, readers find Geertz’s conceptualizations of culture, as well as an articulation of what the anthropologist does with respect to cultural study. As he explains, thick description is the simultaneous depiction and interpretation of cultural symbols. Furthermore, a culture system is distinguished from a social system in that the culture system provides the terms under which the social system, and therefore social events, behaviors, institutions, and processes, are understood and given meaning.

“Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behavior—or, more precisely, social action—that cultural forms find articulation.”

Geertz alludes to the conceptual revision of the mind and other articulations of the function of culture that will come in later chapters. The idea that cultural forms find articulation in the flow of behavior suggests that the mind and body are not separate and that the intermingled processes of human thought and cultural organization are central to human behavior.

“Undirected by culture patterns—organized systems of significant symbols—man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless. Culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just an ornament of human existence but—the principal basis of its specificity—an essential condition for it”

Geertz conceives culture to be not merely tangential, but rather integral to humanity. Without cultural patterns as an organizing framework, there would be neither meaning nor shape to human behavior or emotion. It is culture that distinguishes humans from lower animals.