Preface

20
In its more encompassing sense, culture is widely defined as semiotic or
semantic.
The concept of culture I espouse…is essentially a semiotic one.
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 search of meaning (Geertz 1973c: 5).
The symbol is ‘the origin and basis of human behaviour’… In all its
dimensions, including the social and the material, human existence is
symbolically constituted, which is to say culturally ordered… White
used to say that no ape could appreciate the difference between holy
water and distilled water – because there isn’t any, chemically (Sahlins
1999: 400, citing Leslie White 1949: 22-39). 22
What is distinctive about humans is not just how they have ordered the
world around them symbolically, but how they reflect upon it.
Consider the extent to which these statements about culture echo an
earlier source.
What is it which makes it possible for us to have [a] distinct, focussed
awareness of things, where animals remain caught in the dream-like,
melodic flow of experience? It is language that makes this possible.
Hence language must be probed from an entirely different point of view.
It is not just a set of signs which have meaning in virtue of referring to
something, it is the necessary vehicle of a certain form of consciousness,
which is characteristically human (Taylor 1975: 19, my parentheses).
Charles Taylor was writing about Herder and his ideas of reflection
(Besonnenheit) as part of laying out the background of German
Romanticism and Idealism (here Herder) necessary to understand the work
of Hegel. 23 We also have an inkling as to what culture keeps at bay: the
22 Note the need to make absolute distinctions. Perhaps the question should be: when, to
whom and on what occasions did people consider water to be holy. Muslim Javanese do
not share Hindu Balinese ideas about the attributes of tirtha.
23
Geertz’s first teaching assignment was the German Romantics, including notably
Herder (Hildred Geertz, personal communication). Geertz follows Herder in other
interesting ways, for instance, his insistence on the inseparability of thought and feeling
(Geertz 1966: 4-5).
My own understanding of this argument, which culminates in the work of Hegel, is that
human thinking and being is always mediated and inseparable from some medium. This is
the theoretical justification, if you need one, of my interest in media studies.