Page 126 - Prathima Volume 12

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Conclusion

Exploring the notions of culture and meaning are ongoing theoretical issues in
anthropology. Today, the debate on culture is more controversial and is being critically
questioned and re-examined in terms of power, place, gender, race, ethnicity,
positionality, and caste. In this concluding section, I would open a window to show
how Geertz (1973) and Rosaldo (1989) handled the problem of understanding and
theorizing the concept of culture in cultural anthropology. Culture, for Geertz (1973),
is not defined by seeing what people do, but what people mean. He, therefore, saw
“culture as text” or by using a culture-as-text metaphor. For Rosaldo (1989), culture is
defined through the concept of “process” or through the notion of culture a distinct
social process rather than as an encapsulated form. However, both scholars have
greatly influenced the theorization of culture in cultural anthropology in different
periods of time. On one hand, Geertz (1973) made an effort to distinguish the concept
of culture from the works of colonial ethnography and the British social anthropology.
On the other hand, the post-modern era had heavily influenced Rosaldo's (1989)
thinking and his contribution to remaking the social analysis of culture in cultural
anthropology.

However, I have found some basic problems in Geertz's work on interpretive
anthropology. The problems are with the explanatory skills of the anthropologist, the
methodology of symbolic anthropology, the validity and reliability of the
interpretation, authoritative knowledge, and truth. In addition, political economists
have also critiqued Geertz's interpretive anthropology, its views of ethnographic
writing and the metaphor of culture as text: 'For whom was text created? Who acted to
make the symbols, and how should the historical transformation of those symbols be
taken into account?' In this regard, Rosaldo (1989) attempted to make his approach
different from Geertz' that he believed in the relevance of everyday experience to
anthropology. Hence, it is very difficult to come up with an interpretation of culture,
because cultures are “ongoing social processes”, which intersect. He sees culture as a
“busy intersection ... where a number of distinct social processes intersect, the
crossroads simply provide a space for distinct trajectories to traverse, rather than
containing them in incomplete encapsulated forms (Rosaldo, 1989, p.17).” Culture is
not a fixed frame to describe, but it is more dynamic and evolves into different forms at
different times. In the 1990s, scholars increasingly saw how colonialism in relation to
the philosophy of the Enlightenment brought a notion of value for free judgment to
scholarship, which was not true. Somehow, Resaldo (1989) claims that he was trying
to eschew “self-judgment in social analysis,” and at the same time he encourages to
have a “neutral sense based social analysis.” Gradually, he claims that describing
social reality might move with “multiple possibilities” and “multiple perspectives”,
which open far more opportunities to study culture or anthropology broadly.

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