Model answer & approach
- Compare and contrast the symbolic approaches of Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner to understand culture. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
Geertz and Turner both made meaning the object of anthropology, but they located it differently: for Geertz symbols are public texts to be read, for Turner they are operators that do work inside social process.
Body
1. Geertz on symbols as text: culture is "webs of significance" man himself has spun; symbols are extrinsic sources of information, publicly available, not in anyone's head. The method is thick description, and the Balinese cockfight is read as a story Balinese tell themselves about themselves. Religion is a system of symbols fusing ethos with worldview.
2. Turner on symbols in ritual process: working from Ndembu ritual, he treats the dominant symbol — the mudyi or milk tree of the Nkang'a girls' rite — as multivocal, condensing many referents and possessing two poles, a normative-ideological pole of matriliny and a sensory-orectic pole of milk, breast and blood. Ritual is set within the social drama of breach, crisis, redress and reintegration, generating liminality and communitas.
3. Where they converge: both reject Radcliffe-Brown's function and Levi-Strauss's unconscious code, both take exegesis seriously, and both make the ethnographer an interpreter rather than a measurer.
4. Where they part: Geertz reads symbols; Turner watches them act, and can therefore explain conflict and change, which Geertz cannot. Turner supplements native exegesis with operational and positional meaning, while Geertz's interpretation is finally the ethnographer's own — the ground of Asad's objection that his reading leaves out power.
Conclusion
Turner explains how ritual transforms situations; Geertz explains how a people's world hangs together. The combination — process from one, interpretation from the other — is what later symbolic anthropology worked with.
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