Interpretive ethnographies, on the other hand, seek powerful collective structures of meaning, congealed in public symbols, within which persons live out (often beyond the ethnography’s field of vision) their unique lives. Culture, a thoroughly social phenomenon, is divorced from, and trumps, psychology. Persons are constrained by culture but culture is in all significant respects independent of psychological or biological factors specific to persons.Consider the approach of our most persuasive, complex, and influential interpretive anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, probably best known for his claim, forcefully presented in essays dating from the 1950s to the present, that symbols, rituals, and performances can be read as texts (e.g., 1973a), with the anthropologist as literary critic (1973f: 9). Even in his earlier, more Parsonian papers such as “Religion as a Cultural System,” first published in 1966, Geertz expresses strong reservations about the utility of psychology for ethnographic analysis:
Symbols . . . are tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs. To undertake the study of cultural activity—activity in which symbolism forms the positive content—is thus not to abandon social analysis for a Platonic cave of shadows, to enter into a mentalistic world of introspective psychology, or, worse, speculative philosophy, and wander there forever in a haze of “Cognitions,” “Affections,” “Conations,” and other elusive entities. Cultural acts, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms, are social events like any other; they are as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture. (Geertz 1973e: 91)
Stated briefly, a symbol is a “vehicle for a conception” (1973e: 91)—a conduit. “Systems of symbols” (90), or “culture patterns” (92), embody those conceptions—their meanings. Such systems, it is claimed, are amenable to analysis, at the “level” of culture; their interrelated meanings can be read without excursions into the marshes of psychology.19
To objectify Geertz’s work as I have above is, of course, somewhat unfair. In perusing The Interpretation of Cultures (1973c), I was struck by the fact that I could have selected passages that seem consonant with my own cognitive argument. I second Geertz’s characterization of anthropology as an imaginative science, his impulse toward comparative theorizing, and his insistence on the embeddedness of meaning in the flow of social life. Consider also his assertion, in the same early essay cited above, that symbols “have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves” (1973e: 93; emphasis added). This is toolmaker discourse, as is Geertz’s vivid claim that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun” (1973f: 5).
Yet, as Gananath Obeyesekere remarks, “In reading Geertz I see webs everywhere, but never the spider at work” (1990: 285). Like Obeyesekere, we remember not the dialectical relation between symbols and “psychological reality,” but that “culture is public because meaning is” (Geertz 1973f: 12). Geertz’s most influential theoretical formulations and empirical analyses are those based in the conduit model, which portray thinking as public, collective, and culturally singular: the insistence on the “social nature of thought” (1973d: 360); the brilliant, particularistic interpretations of the cockfight, the wajang, and the Balinese naming system. I would suggest that our perceptions of Geertz are distorted not through careless reading, though he is a demanding, subtle writer, but because he himself underplays the inkblot motifs in his writing and because we bring conduit understandings of communication to his work. We catch glimpses of alternative schemes, but Geertz registers most strongly with us when his writing articulates with and reconfirms our commonsense understandings.
Most interpretive anthropology—pick an ethnography off the shelf—is less sensitive and fastidious than Geertz’s. Generally speaking, interpretive studies draw upon and perpetuate the conduit model. When interpretive anthropologists look for meaning, they, like ordinary users of language, look for it in symbols. By assigning meanings to symbols, interpretive anthropology imparts a strongly culturalist bias to human studies. The point is not that a concept of culture is irrelevant to human studies—far from it—but that it must be put in its analytical place.
So Where, and What, Is the Culture?
In rejecting the conduit model, I have also rejected the equation of culture with symbol systems. Culture consists of meanings in people, not meanings in tokens. This formulation, however, presents serious conceptual challenges.
Theodore Schwartz (1978) recounts how, as he contemplated the incredible diversity in opinions offered by the inhabitants of Manus, he found himself asking “Where is the culture?”20 He coined the term “idioverse” to designate a person’s subjective reality. Idioverse is a useful heuristic concept. The toolmakers live in disparate idioverses; attaining correspondence between portions of idioverses is, according to Reddy, the object of communication—and, I would suggest, the origin of culture. Culture, then, refers to the overlap of idioverses among members of a given group at a given moment—the temporary set of their intersubjective conceptual networks. As emphasized above, this intersubjective array is not just a determinant, but also an unfolding product, of the public trade in symbols.
Unlike most culture concepts, which stress conformity and continuity, culture thus defined is partial, multiple, and plastic. Some meanings are noncultural; everyone participates in many discrepant “cultures”; and cultural meanings can and do change. A comparison of Reddy’s work with that of a second cognitive linguist, Ronald Langacker, brings some of these points into sharper focus.
Langacker’s innovative, controversial “cognitive grammar” (1986, 1987, 1991), which unfortunately I can do no more than sketch here, offers a new paradigm for the field of linguistics. Denying that “language is a self-contained system amenable to algorithmic characterization, with sufficient autonomy to be studied in essential isolation from broader cognitive concerns,” Langacker insists that “language is neither self-contained nor describable without essential reference to cognitive processing” (1986: 1). Indeed, he equates meaning with conceptualization rather than, as is usual, with bundles of essential features or sets of truth conditions (1986: 2–3).
Thus lexical items are points of entry into “knowledge [conceptual] systems whose scope is essentially open-ended” (1986: 2). Both the entities comprising this system (concepts) and the relationships among them (perceptual and transformative cognitive processes) are postulated to be real features of the mental world rather than formal semiotic units and operations. That is, words “mean” a conventionalized network of concepts interrelated by various cognitive processes. By implication, the network activated (or accessed) by any lexical item is part of a knowledge system of encyclopedic size.
Like Reddy, Langacker distinguishes between symbol and meaning: for him, symbols activate part of an immense knowledge system located in mind. But Langacker emphasizes congruent rather than idiosyncratic zones of idioverses.21 Langacker’s meanings are both cognitive and, because shared, cultural. Such conventionalized meanings—learned, shared meanings that are recognized as shared (Langacker 1987: 62; D’Andrade 1987: 113)—become fixed points of orientation in thought.22 Hence Langacker takes up where Reddy leaves off—after the toolmakers have managed to agree upon meanings. Such consensus meanings need not be accepted as, or felt to be, paramount, but they are inescapable: herein lies culture’s constraining quality.
By contrast, Reddy’s account of toolmaker incomprehension highlights not the symbol’s instantiation of shared conceptual networks but the variability in its construal, the gap of indeterminacy between public symbol and private meaning that reveals culture’s limits. A meaning-system view of culture emphasizes that conventionalized