Although lesser anthropologists may have described themselves as ‘symbolic anthropologists’ and thought of themselves as constituting a’school’, it is quite clear that the three most influential figures in the emergence of symbolic anthropology—Geertz, Turner and Schneider—differed considerably in their intentions and approaches. What they shared, and what gives retrospective coherence to the work of the 1970s in particular, is the triumph of a certain vision of culture as a set of shared meanings. Where they differed was in the extent to which they attempted to relate their vision of cultural meaning to social processes and social practices. Turner never completely lost his sociological roots in British social anthropology, and Geertz’s early work makes frequent reference to issues of sociology (although he gradually distanced himself further and further from the concerns of his British and French colleagues). Schneider was most overt in his attempts to remove the study of culture from the study of *society.
This uneasiness with what was felt to be sociological or *functionalist reductionism separated American symbolic anthropologists from colleagues pursuing apparently similar goals elsewhere. In Britain †Mary Douglas, for example, saw her work on symbolic boundaries and natural symbols as a direct continuation of †Durkheim’s comparative sociology, as to some extent did †Rodney Needham, who nevertheless managed to isolate a domain of symbols and symbolic exegesis every bit as isolated from social action and history as the work of his American contemporaries. The work which most explicitly confronted the European sociological tradition with the cultural concerns of American symbolic anthropology was Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason (1976). As well as arguing against all those who would ‘reduce’ cultural phenomena to social explanations, Sahlins first confronted, then co-opted, the two main rival strains of 1970s European theory, Marxism and structuralism. Marxism, Sahlins argued, is ultimately predicated upon peculiarly Western assumptions about material needs and economic rationality; as such it can function as a compelling self-account of ‘the West’, but imposes one historically specific and inappropriate cultural logic on to non-Western societies. He is much more sympathetic to Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, and employs its procedures in his analyses, yet is clearly uneasy about its location of an ultimate cause in the transcultural ether of the human spirit. In the ascension of culture-as-meaning in the late 1970s, Sahlins’s argument carried more weight with European anthropologists, not least because it was so palpably engaged, however critically, with their own intellectual traditions.
Intellectually, there were certain obvious problems with the symbolic anthropology of the 1970s (ably summarized by Ortner 1984). Too often symbols were abstracted from social action, resulting in an idealist and oddly conservative view of the world. Similarly, symbolic systems seemed curiously atemporal and, like structuralism, unable to deal with history. †Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) seemed to point the way out of the first dilemma by showing how implicit meanings were marshalled in the service of power, and how individual agents pursued strategies rather than mutely obeyed rules. Moreover, Bourdieu argued that in emphasizing problems of meaning, translation and interpretation, anthropologists unreflexively equated their problem, as academically-trained outsiders trying to make sense of an unfamiliar social landscape, with the human condition. Bourdieu’s work was, nevertheless, equally open to the second criticism, that of being unable to deal with history and change. Sahlins provided the most remarkable attempt to provide a theorized account of historical change within the logic of a cultural or symbolic system in his work on first contact in Hawaii (Sahlins 1981). Many others followed, gradually shedding Sahlins’ structuralism but not his attachment to symbolic analysis, in their interpretations of societies in history.
The least resilient aspect of symbolic anthro pology was the notion of culture itself. Empirically, it became less and less possible for anthropologists to maintain the necessary fiction of a world made up of separate, discrete, internally homogeneous cultures. This may have been obvious in the *world-system of the 1980s, but it could be shown to have been equally dubious as a depiction of the 1880s, 1780s or even 1680s (Wolf 1982). Moreover, it could easily be shown that ‘culture’ was itself every bit as ‘Western’, and therefore culturally and historically specific, as Marxism and functionalism and any of the other forbidden reductionisms of the symbolic anthropologists. And the whole problem of ‘meaning-for-whom’ was reopened in the light of feminist and †post-structuralist, critiques which challenged both the view of cultures as unproblematically homogeneous, and the idea that meaning can be unequivocally fixed. Finally, Sperber’s 1970s challenge to the notion of ‘meaning’ returned, as anthropologists interested in the cross-disciplinary study of *cognition started to argue that a great deal of cultural knowledge was not analogous to language at all.
