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Symbolic anthropology aims to thoroughly understand the way meanings are assigned by individuals to certain things, leading then to a cultural expression. [2] There are two majorly recognized approaches to the interpretation of symbolic anthropology, the interpretive approach, and the symbolic approach.
Clifford James Geertz (/ ɡ ɜːr t s / ⓘ; August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States."
Geertz's thick-description approach, along with the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, has become increasingly recognized as a method of symbolic anthropology, [9] [5] enlisted as a working antidote to overly technocratic, mechanistic means of understanding cultures, organizations, and historical settings.
Influenced by Hermeneutic tradition, Clifford Geertz developed an interpretive anthropology of understanding the meaning of the society. The hermeneutic approach allows Geertz to close the distance between an ethnographer and a given culture similar to reader and text relationship. The reader reads a text and generates his/her own meaning.
The book is a foundational text in cultural anthropology and represents Geertz’s vision of how culture should be studied and understood. The essays collectively argue for a new approach to anthropology, one that emphasizes the interpretive analysis of culture, which Geertz describes as
Applied anthropology refers to the application of the method and theory of anthropology to the analysis and solution of practical problems. It is a "complex of related, research-based, instrumental methods which produce change or stability in specific cultural systems through the provision of data, initiation of direct action, and/or the ...
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Examples of symbolic culture include concepts (such as good and evil), mythical constructs (such as gods and underworlds), and social constructs (such as promises and football games). [9] Symbolic culture is a domain of objective facts whose existence depends, paradoxically, on collective belief.