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Bigamy 149
tury there were classic expositions by Peter Winch and Cli·ord
Geertz. Behind them lies Max Weber. Some key quotations: ‘let
human behaviour . . . be called “action” if and insofar as the person
or persons who act connect it with a subjective meaning’ (Weber);
‘Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in
webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those
webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science
in search of law but an interpretive one in seach of meaning’
(Geertz); ‘social interaction can more profitably be compared to
the exchange of ideas in a conversation than to the interaction of
forces in a physical system’ (Winch).
A brief consideration of the history of Christmas suggests that
Weber, Winch, and Geertz were on the right lines. Christmas was
celebrated at the winter solstice from Julius Caesar’s time. The
pagan religious significance grew. The sun came to be regarded
by many as the divinity behind other gods. In 274 the emperor
made 25 December the ‘Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun’. The
idea of Christ as ‘the sun of righteousness’ (Mal. 4: 2) enabled
the transition to a Christian feast. Then for centuries and for
many still Christmas celebrated the birth of Christ. Now for many
others it is instead a secular festival of good fellowship and the
family. To take celebration of Christmas today as proof of religious
feeling would be a mistake, just as it is a mistake to assume that its
incorporation into Christian liturgy indicated the survival of pagan
religion. What counts is the meaning behind the actions and rituals.
Nevertheless, a text here and there is not enough to establish that a
ritual has modified its meaning. The texts suggesting that need to
be influential and popular. Furthermore, one would expect small
but symptomatic changes in the mode of celebration. Thus a family
P. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London
etc., 1958).
e.g. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London etc.,
1973; repr. 1993).
The sentence in full: ‘“Handeln” soll dabei ein menschliches Verhalten (einerlei
ob •au¢eres oder innerliches Tun, Unterlassen oder Dulden) hei¢en, wenn und
insofern als der oder die Handelnden mit ihm einen subjektiven Sinn verbinden’
(Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1).
C. Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in
id., The Interpretation of Cultures, 3–30at5.
Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 128.
The foregoing is taken from B. Blackburn and L. Holford-Strevens, The Oxford
Companion to the Year (Oxford, 1999), 514–15.