ANT102H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Clifford Geertz, Social Anthropology, Social Relation
Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology (ANT102)
Lecture 2
What anthropologist study?
•One of the most common answer is either culture or society.
◦Culture is about what people think and society is about what people do.
•Some american anthropologists find that it is convenient to combine these two things, hence
the sociocultural anthropology.
◦sociocultural anthropologist might consider what people think that is their culture and also
what they do, which is society, social relations, how they organizes everyday social
meetings.
Culture
•very few anthropologists have ever agreed on what in the world they are talking about when
they talk about culture.
•In 1952, for example, two famous anthropologists wrote a very famous book, which detailed
over 300 definitions of culture that were circulating at the time. Even so, it is quite hard as we
seem to have no idea what we are talking about amongst ourselves.
•There are common traits, from the textbook, in fact, there is a list of 10 things.
1. Coherent, a systematic hold
2. learnt, not inborn, or biologically determined, something that we learn from people
around us
3. passed on through generation, closely linked to the learnt trait
4. shared, stable and contain a stable system of knowledge, believes, and value
5. symbols and symbolic system, tends to be very complex
6. about meaning
7. public, because meaning is public
8. requires interpretation, so for anthropologist, what we are doing is actually interpreting
other’s interpretations, building layers on layers
9. informs action, we do thing because we think a certain way
10. fiction, exist only as words, at least as intangible object, an abstraction
•So culture is an idea that anthropologist used to organize the world, and culture is not the world
itself.
For anthropology, culture is not the way the world is structured.
•one of the famous anthropologists of the 20th century, Clifford Geertz, have the following
definition of culture.
•Culture is “a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of
inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate,
perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”
•Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973
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