The term symbolic anthropology is usually used to cover a broad tendency in the anthropology of the late 1960s and 1970s. Symbolic anthropology involved the study of *culture as a relatively autonomous entity, a system of meaning which the anthropologist would attempt to unravel through the decoding or interpretation of key symbols and *rituals. If symbolic anthropology ever constituted a distinctive school, its home was in *American anthropology, especially in those students and colleagues who had been influenced by its three key figures—†Clifford Geertz, †Victor Turner and †David Schneider—all of whom briefly coincided at the University of Chicago around 1970. Geertz and Schneider were both products of †Talcott Parsons’ Harvard Social Relations department of the early 1950s, while Turner was a genuine maverick: a Scottish protégé of †Max Gluckman whose eclecticism and intellectual ambition found a more comfortable home in American anthropology. The founding texts are Turner’s analyses of the rituals and symbols of the Ndembu of Zambia (Turner 1967), Schneider’s American Kinship: A Cultural Account ([1968] 1980), and Geertz’s essays of the 1960s and early 1970s, collected in his Interpretation of Cultures (1973).
To this trio, we should probably add the work of †Marshall Sahlins, who started the 1970s an economic anthropologist of a gently Marxist persuasion, but declared his conversion to the American cultural tradition in the highly influential Culture and Practical Reason (1976).
Although influenced by *Lévi-Strauss’s *structuralism, most obviously in treating culture as analogous to language, symbolic anthropology departed from Lévi-Strauss in two important ways. One was a resistance to scientistic *methodology, most clearly articulated in Geertz’s post-1970 writings. The other was an emphasis on cultural particularism, which had deep roots in American anthropology from the time of *Boas, and his successors like †Ruth Benedict, but which was at odds with Lévi-Strauss’s concern with the panhuman roots of specific symbolic structures. Although symbolic anthropology was an American expression for a predominantly American movement, its effects were felt much more widely. In Britain, Scandinavia, Holland and France, for example, where structuralism and structural Marxism had far more impact in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the late 1970s there was a marked shifted towards issues of culture and interpretation, and away from grand theories. This was least true in France, but even there the work of Sahlins proved influential in linking American culturalism to more characteristically European traditions of social anthropology.
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