Opposing Views On Clifford Greetz's View Of Culture

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Clifford Greetz has written “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”. Greetz is trying to say that people make these webs themselves. Those webs are the culture and we all are born into it. Culture might not be a true base of science where we are trying to discover or enforce laws, but it is a science in which we can interpret human behavior. Anthropology is a science which is very flexible and may vary in different cultures. I agree with Greetz opinion when he cites Max Weber as his point of departure to develop …show more content…

That group makes up a culture. “Culture is an attribute not of individuals per se but of individuals as members of groups. Culture is transmitted socially in society” (Kottack, “Window in Humanity”, P.19). We all trap ourselves in the web. That web has certain limits, boundaries, norms that each individual has to follow and obey because they are a part of that culture. Since, we are born into this web we are certainly not responsible for what we are trapped in, but leaving the web may lead to deviance. The web plays a vital role in unifying groups with similar beliefs and thoughts. In my opinion one of the most important factors in making and developing culture is symbols. Symbols help individual communicate and understand each other better. In the slides, it said “to understand certain parts of human culture, one must understand the way human use …show more content…

Science by definition is a study of behavior of physical and natural world through observation and experiment. On the other hand, culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habitus and music. In science, we try to study how one thing is related to another and what can it tell us about the past and ancestors. How present explains the past. In anthropology, we are trying to study how human interreact. Interaction amongst humans can tell us various things about how interactions have been carried out in the past. “Culture originated when our ancestors acquired the abilities to use symbols” (Kottack, “Window on Humanity”, p.19). Use of symbols was a manner of communicating in past and it has been inherited in us through genes. This is the reason why I agree with greetz because we inherited the ability to identify and use

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