Culture and Public Action, Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton (editors), Stanford University Press, 2004. The South Asia Edition has been published by Permanent Black.
Symbolic anthropology (otherwise known as Interpretive anthropology) is an umbrella school that includes those anthropologists who stress culture as meaning, expressed through symbolic means. In many ways the movement took hold in reaction to what was being argued as the sterile scientism of both ecological materialist approaches and cognitive (modeling) approaches. The conceptualization of culture as symbolic implies an interpretive approach from the “natives point of view”. Generally speaking, symbolic anthropologists agreed on certain principals: Symbols carried multiple meanings. Symbols were used and created in public, social exchanges. The identification of cultural life requires isolating symbols, identifying their meanings, and showing how they resonate within a specific dynamic cultural context. However, there still existed several variants of the symbolic approach. The three most common stem from the works of Clifford Geertz, Harold Schneider, and Victor Turner.
An Ambiguous Animation Painted on Public Walls
