Webs of Significance

In The Interpretation of Cultures, first published in 1973, anthropologist Clifford Geertz expressed his arguments for what the study of culture should be about:

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (p. 5)

Culture is not something imposed on people, argued Geertz, but it is created and recreated by them through their involvement in social relationships and through social interaction. The challenge for sociologists, anthropologists, and others concerned with understanding culture is not to take an approach that it is possible to treat culture as another social fact (thereby making a science of society possible in the way functionalists argued) but to venture into hermeneutics and interpret how the world is created, what cultural artifacts and symbols mean, and how aspects of culture provide insight into human nature. Social interaction, therefore, is essentially a transaction of meanings between people who are engaged in the production of social meaning.