2.4 Theory of Symbolism

Claim: culture is not behaviour or function but a web of symbols and meanings — to be interpreted, not measured; man is the meaning-making animal.Exponents:• Clifford Geertz (interpretive anthropology): culture as "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings… a web of significance" — man "an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" the method: thick description (the Balinese cockfight read as the society's self-story — deep play as text); cultures as texts awaiting reading.• Victor Turner (liminality's cartographer): ritual as social drama — the liminal phase (betwixt and between) where structure dissolves and communitas (raw fellowship) forms; rites of passage (van Gennep's structure — Sociology Unit 4.3's Nepali rites), pilgrimage, and ritualsof rebellion (license as safety-valve or as real critique?).• Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger): pollution rules as society's map — dirt as "matter out ofplace" — the Jewish and Hindu dietary codes as symbolic order: directly the anthropological theory of jutho and caste purity (Sociology Unit 2.3's norm now explained); Natural Symbols.• (The lineage: Weber's interpretive sociology → Geertz; Schneider's American kinship-as- symbols; Leach's political ritual.) Nepal application (rich — learn two): the Newar festival cycle (Indra Jatra, Bisket Jatra) as cosmic-political theatre — kingship, locality and gods re- inscribed annually; sacrifice and prasada circuits (Dasain) as hierarchy enacted and redistributed; the jhankri's seance as illness's symbolic…