Page 89 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

72 Angela Zito

Culture (and religion) as meaning

One can hardly overestimate the influence of Geertz’s version of culture as
symbolic on disciplines outside of anthropology proper, including history,
media theory, cultural and literary studies, and various area studies far
beyond his own fieldwork sites of Indonesia and Morocco. He was himself
much influenced by philosopher Suzanne Langer and burst forth with his
anti-functionalist meaning-centric anthropology on an era saturated with the
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(re)discovery of “meaning” as the key philosophic problem. The late sixties
and the seventies were an era of the “discovery” of the culture concept in this
new guise—as a symbolic dimension, liberated from any taint of functional
usefulness and instrumentality—and much reduced from its more holistic
use by earlier social anthropologists. 3
A relatively obscure essay from 1977 by theologian John Morgan
strikes the celebratory tone of the era. He puts Geertz in dialogue with the
“cultural theologian” Paul Tillich (as Tillich called himself) over “Religion
and Culture as Meaning Systems.” Morgan notes that, having “set(s) out to
articulate the distinction between culture and social system…[Geertz] seeks
to come to grips with dimensions of human culture, particularly of meaning
which except for Weber, have too frequently gone unattended by traditional
functionalism” (Morgan 1977: 367). As religion and culture are both taken
to be “meaning systems,” it was possible for anthropologists and theologians
to embark on a conversation about analytics. Thus, we see produced a festive
tangle among meaning, religion, and culture. Tillich’s own contribution to
this ferment was the concept of “meaning-reality,” which, according to
Morgan, “cannot be expressed in the raw, but rather, must be experientially
expressed through religiocultural media, that is, symbol systems” (Morgan
1977: 369; italics added).
It was Geertz’s beginning from the symbolic itself that seemed to offer so
much promise, and indeed provides still, today, a fine pedagogical starting
point for understanding the salience of the materiality of the symbolic for
cultural analysis. In his famous article, “Religion as a Cultural System,”
first published in 1966, he applied his symbolic analysis model to religion,
providing an oft-quoted definition. A religion is

(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and
long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions
of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with
such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem
uniquely realistic.
(1973: 90)