Cultural Anthropology

On Culture as Text

Mouad Aazi

5 min read

Apr 7, 2021

In Cultural anthropology, the goal is to study and understand human culture; but how can we do that exactly? In the past, people might consider a quick visit to the place (tourism, for instance) sufficient to learn about the culture, then we learned that it is really not possible for an outsider to fully comprehend a specific culture without living with its members for months and years, adopting a cultural relativistic perspective, and then objectively conducting heavy ethnographic works (through participant observation) that describe the beliefs and behaviours of the targeted culture, the results of which are to be then used in ethnological studies to compare and contrast the culture with other cultures. But are these methods and approaches really sufficient for an outsider to accurately understand a culture and get into the minds of its members? After all, the linguistic turn in philosophy has made us question to what extent our language – let alone our culture - has an influence on how we see the world and thus other people and cultures. Since research always begins with preconceptions, tools, and language molded through our own culture and societal ideas, how is it that we can avoid this difference of perspective?

Clifford Geertz, the father of modern interpretive cultural anthropology, had an influential answer. Contrary to the approaches that viewed laws, structures, and functions as bases of social-scientific and cultural explanation, Geertz gave importance to the symbolic aspect of cultures, believing that symbols are a direct reflection of a culture. So to understand the meaning of human behaviour, the anthropologist, he says, must unravel, decode, and interpret the meanings that are encoded within cultural symbols in their particular cultural context. He suggests that a culture is a complex assemblage of texts that constitute a web of meanings which are understood by actors themselves – and actors alone; for this reason, the anthropologist can only interpret the meaning of the culture through the eyes of its members by understanding how they are interpreting themselves and their own experiences.

When studying cultures through the lens of interpretive anthropology, the goal is not just observing cultural forms or superficially describing physical behaviors as they appear to the anthropologist (what Geertz calls thin description) but rather adding details about their context—including the subjective explanations and meanings provided by the people engaged in the behavior—to provide her and the reader of the ethnographic work with an ‘emic view’ and enable them to understand the significant and complex cultural meanings underpinning these behaviors (what he calls thick description). What this means is that just like a piece of a text cannot be understood correctly and accurately relying on its semantic meaning alone without paying attention to the context in which it appears (pragmatic meaning), the actions of the members of a culture, similarly, can only be understood when it is described within the context in which it takes place. Starting from this, Geertz sees doing ethnography as similar to reading a text, which later gave rise to the metaphor of “culture as text”.

Geertz’s influence is connected with a “massive cultural shift” in the social sciences referred to as the interpretive turn. Before this turn, social sciences were seen within positivist paradigms (in the words of Durkheim) as logical continuation of the natural sciences and thus should maintain the same objectivity, rationalism, and study of cause and effect to discover theories and laws governing human behavior; but later on - through the interpretive turn (with Weber’s interpretive sociology – verstehen) - social scientists started to study social actions in their specific contexts and attempted to decode the cultural meanings behind norms, values, and symbols, and interpret social reality and particular behavior of a community through the subjective viewpoints of its actors. Actors were no longer treated as objects of observation but rather as subjects.

Now, having talked about how we can better understand the behavior of a particular community, it is crucial - particularly with the aforementioned metaphor of “culture as text” - that I mention Foucault’s contribution (though not directly related to the field of cultural anthropology). We, individuals, behave in a certain way within society, but what is more important is that this behavior is the result of many conscious thoughts and choices we constantly make; what we forget to take into account is that though a person makes the choice of wearing a green shirt or red shirt, for instance, the idea of him making a choice between wearing a shirt and not wearing a shirt at all is not even considered, it is unconsciously dismissed. This is a very simple example of how this individual’s culture—more specifically the episteme above her culture which grounds all discourses and thus most sources of knowledge—has made her make certain choices and subsequently behave in a certain ‘predictable’ way.

The second idea regarding our actions, according to Foucault, is how they are also highly affected by society – and culture- through a subtle and invisible ‘power’—the normalizing power as he calls it in ‘Discipline and Punish’- which determines what we see as normal, which constructs our view of the world and ourselves, and accordingly shapes our desires,

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