Page 116 - Prathima Volume 12

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culturally variable.” (Marcus & Fischer, 1999, p.46) This shift calls for creation of
different writing strategies and Marcus & Fischer (1999) divide these experiments into
these categories: psychodynamic ethnographies, realist ethnographies, and modernist
texts.

Moreover, the concept of the term “Political economy” is making its way back into the
discourse of anthropology, and it has integrated into the role of the anthropologist in
attempting to weave together the ideas of political economy and interpretive
anthropology still remaining true to the “diversity and complexity of local situations”
(Marcus & Fischer, 1999, p. 88). Experiments in text construction have begun to
attend to this problem. Thus, Marcus & Fischer (1999) have observed that there is a
crisis of representation happening across all social sciences.

In this conjunction, many contemporary anthropologists have started exploring how to
do anthropology by avoiding the issues of representation, positionality, reflexivity,
and ethnocentrism in anthropological writings about culture and society. Unlike early
in anthropological works, many people have incorporated the role of capitalism,
Marxism, (Rosebery, 1997, 1989), global capitalism (Robins, 2002), and cultural
dimension of global capitalism (Appadurai, 1996, 1990) in their anthropological
writings. Based on this background, we could understand that culture and society are
not static, but they are constantly changing due to different social, political, economic,
and modern technological forces. On the contrary, functionalists' works on society and
culture were placed in a bracket or a box that came to define what is society and
culture. Such conceptualization about culture and society has failed to capture the
diversity in human society and culture. Furthermore, the contemporary
anthropologists have adopted the works of Marxism, political economy, interpretive
anthropology, feminism, post-structuralism, and practice theory to reinvent
ethnographic methods and anthropological writings.

Under these circumstances, Geertz's (1973) works have greatly influenced the
anthropological writings on culture and he conceives culture as a system. Certainly,
Geertz (1973) believed that culture does not emerge from the human mind because
“culture is a public one.” Though the cognitive process is fairly consistent among
humans, people use symbols to construct meaning. Through such a large collection of
elaborative interpretations, we have thick descriptions to understand the human
culture. For Geertz (1973), culture was a way of acting out a symbol, which ultimately
reflects the nature of the world and how people would create their life according to it.
He elucidates that culture is semiotic in nature. This semiotic nature of culture focuses
on the web of symbols. He gives more importance to meaning which has been adopted
from Weber's (1958) Verstehenden methodology, which examines the meaning of
action from the actor's point of view. To elaborate it further, individuals are expected to

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