Theories in Social Anthropology III: Symbolic Anthropology (Turner, Firth, Douglas), Cognitive Anthropology (D'Andrade, Tyler, Goodenough), Geertz's Interpretive Anthropology, Anthropology and Gender, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism, and Ethnicity

Symbolic anthropology treats culture as a system of shared symbols and meanings, and asks how symbols work in ritual, classification and social life. Its British strand grew out of structural-functionalism and stayed close to social action; its American strand, around Geertz and David Schneider, treated culture as a system of meanings in its own right. Victor Turner (1920–1983), trained at Manchester under Max Gluckman, worked among the Ndembu of north-western Zambia. Schism and Continuity in an African Society (1957) introduced the social drama, a sequence of breach, crisis, redressive action and reintegration or recognised schism through which conflict unfolds in village life. In The Forest of Symbols (1967) he analysed Ndembu ritual symbols: the dominant symbol, such as the milk tree (mudyi) in the girls' puberty ritual, which exudes a white latex, is multivocal — it condenses many meanings, unifies disparate ones by analogy, and polarises them between a sensory pole (breast milk, nourishment) and an ideological pole (matriliny, the unity of Ndembu society); instrumental symbols are means to the ends of a particular ritual. Building on Arnold van Gennep's The Rites of Passage (1909), which divided such rites into separation, transition (margin, the liminal phase) and incorporation (aggregation), Turner made the liminal phase a subject in itself: novices "betwixt and between" (1964) are stripped of status, treated as equals, humbled and taught, and experience communitas, an unstructured bond of equal individuals that contrasts with the differentiated structure of ordinary life. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) distinguished existential (spontaneous), normative and ideological communitas and extended the idea to pilgrimage, millenarian movements and the "liminoid" leisure of industrial societies. Raymond Firth, whose Tikopia work runs through the whole of Unit VIII, turned in Symbols: Public and Private (1973) to the way symbols serve both as public, collective representations and as private meanings for individuals, from flags and food to hair. Mary Douglas (1921–2007), trained at Oxford and a fieldworker among the Lele of the Kasai (Congo), argued in Purity and Danger (1966) that dirt is "matter out of place": pollution beliefs protect a system of classification by marking what is anomalous or ambiguous. Her reading of the abominations of Leviticus explains the prohibited animals, such as the pig, which is cloven-hoofed but does not chew the cud, as creatures that do not fit their class; the Lele pangolin cult honours an anomalous animal. The body, she argued, is an image of society, and the concern with bodily boundaries mirrors concern with social ones. Natural Symbols (1970) introduced grid and group: group measures how far individuals are bound into a bounded unit, grid how far their lives are regulated by rules and classifications, giving four types of social environment and associated cosmologies; the scheme later grew into cultural theory of risk (Risk and Culture, with Aaron Wildavsky, 1982), and The World of Goods (with Baron Isherwood, 1979) applied her approach to consumption. Indian anthropology has used Douglas in the analysis of purity and pollution in caste, alongside Louis Dumont.

Cognitive anthropology locates culture in the minds of its members: it studies how people classify their world and what they must know to act in it. It began in the 1950s as ethnoscience or "the new ethnography", borrowing its methods from linguistics. Ward H. Goodenough (1919–2013) gave the defining statement in "Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics" (1957): "a society's culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members". Culture, on this view, is not behaviour or artefacts but the knowledge that generates and interprets them, and the ethnographer's task is to write the rules a native would use. With Floyd Lounsbury, Goodenough developed componential analysis (1956): kinship terms, like phonemes, are defined by a small set of contrasting semantic features — generation, sex, lineality, the sex of the linking relative, consanguinity or affinity — so that a terminology can be written as a matrix of components; his own material came from Truk (Chuuk) in Micronesia. Harold Conklin's study of Hanunóo colour categories (1955) in the Philippines and Charles Frake's work on Subanun disease terms (1961) showed how folk taxonomies — lexical hierarchies of contrast and inclusion — could be elicited systematically. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's Basic Color Terms (1969) found that languages have at most eleven basic colour terms and acquire them in a constrained order, beginning with black and white (dark and light), then red — a finding that brought universals back into a field that had been relativist. Stephen A. Tyler edited the collection Cognitive Anthropology (1969), whose introduction framed the programme: to discover how different peoples organise and use their cultures, the organising principles underlying behaviour, rather than to predict behaviour itself; Tyler later turned to postmodernism, writing "Post-Modern Ethnography" for Writing Culture (1986). Roy D'Andrade (1931–2016) carried the field from taxonomies to cultural models and schemas — shared, often tacit, mental models of how things work, such as folk models of the mind or of marriage — linking anthropology to cognitive psychology; his The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (1995) is the standard history, and with A. Kimball Romney he worked on the measurement of shared knowledge, which Romney, Susan Weller and William Batchelder formalised as cultural consensus theory (1986). Critics — Geertz among them — objected that meaning is public, not locked in heads, and that formal analyses of kin terms and plant names left out what mattered most to people; cognitive anthropologists replied that the study of meaning needs a theory of how it is represented and learned.

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), trained in Harvard's Department of Social Relations under Talcott Parsons and Clyde Kluckhohn, worked in Java, Bali and Morocco and became the most widely read anthropologist of his generation. His early books were ethnographic and historical: The Religion of Java (1960) described three variants of Javanese religion — abangan (village syncretism and the slametan feast), santri (orthodox Islam, linked to traders) and priyayi (the Hindu-Javanese aristocratic and official tradition); Agricultural Involution (1963) argued that Dutch colonial exploitation pushed Javanese wet-rice agriculture into "involution", absorbing ever more labour into ever more intricate cultivation without transforming it; Islam Observed (1968) compared religious development in Morocco and Indonesia. The theoretical programme came in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). "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." Culture is public, because meaning is: it lives in shared symbols and acts, not in private heads — a direct challenge to cognitive anthropology. The ethnographer's task is thick description, a phrase Geertz took from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle: a thin description records that a boy's eyelid contracted; a thick one distinguishes a twitch from a wink, a parody of a wink and a rehearsal of a parody, by setting the act in the layered frames of meaning in which it is produced and understood. This is the sense in which the syllabus's "deep ethnography" should be read: understanding built up from the close reading of particular events, "from the native's point of view", moving between the experience-near concepts of the people and the experience-distant concepts of the analyst (terms borrowed from the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut). Culture is to be read like a text, "an ensemble of texts", over the shoulders of those to whom it properly belongs. In "Religion as a Cultural System" (1966) Geertz defined religion as "(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", and distinguished the symbol as a "model of" reality from the symbol as a "model for" it. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" (1972), taking "deep play" from Jeremy Bentham's term for bets so high that it is irrational to engage in them, read the cockfight as a story the Balinese tell themselves about themselves — about status, masculinity and hidden violence. Negara (1980) described the precolonial Balinese "theatre state", in which power served pomp rather than pomp power; Local Knowledge (1983) and Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988) turned to anthropology as writing. Critics asked whose reading a thick description is, how it can be checked, and whether it attends to power and conflict — Talal Asad objected that his definition of religion universalises a Christian, belief-centred model — and the question of the ethnographer's authority became the starting point of the postmodern critique.

The anthropology of gender began in the 1970s as the anthropology of women, a response to ethnographies in which women appeared, if at all, as objects exchanged by men. Its first step distinguished sex, the biological difference, from gender, the cultural meanings and roles built on it — a distinction Mead's work had anticipated — and Gayle Rubin (1975) spoke of the "sex/gender system". Woman, Culture, and Society (1974), edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, asked why women's subordination seemed universal: Michelle Rosaldo (1944–1981) located it in the opposition between a domestic sphere assigned to women and a public sphere dominated by men, and Sherry Ortner, in the same volume, asked "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?". Later work criticised these universals as themselves products of Western categories and turned to the diversity of gender systems, to masculinity, to the intersection of gender with class, caste and race, and to gender and sexual diversity. Renato Rosaldo (born 1941), Michelle's husband, studied with her among the Ilongot of northern Luzon in the Philippines (Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974, 1980). After her death in a fall during fieldwork in 1981, he wrote "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage" (1984), explaining that he had understood the Ilongot claim that the rage in grief impels men to take a head only when his own bereavement made that rage intelligible to him; he argued for the ethnographer as a "positioned subject", and in Culture and Truth (1989) for an anthropology of emotion, borderlands and cultural citizenship — the reason his name stands in the syllabus's gender line. Marilyn Strathern (born 1941), who worked in the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea (Women in Between, 1972), argued in The Gender of the Gift (1988) that Western ideas of the individual, society, and male and female as fixed attributes of persons do not fit Melanesia, where persons are "dividuals" composed of relations, gender is a property of acts, objects and exchanges rather than of bodies alone, and a person may appear as male or female according to the relation in which they act; After Nature (1992) and Reproducing the Future (1992) turned the analysis on English kinship and the new reproductive technologies. Leela Dube (1923–2012), the leading Indian feminist anthropologist, studied matrilineal Muslims of the Lakshadweep islands (Matriliny and Islam, 1969) and wrote on the socialisation of girls, the "seed and earth" metaphor of procreation in Indian thought — in which the man provides the seed and the woman the field, underpinning patrilineal claims to children and to land ("Seed and Earth", 1986) — and on women and kinship across South and Southeast Asia (Women and Kinship, 1997); her work linked gender to caste, kinship, property and religion. Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) — the syllabus's "Hutson" — an African American writer who studied anthropology at Barnard College under Boas, collected African American folklore in Florida and hoodoo practice in New Orleans (Mules and Men, 1935) and studied Vodou in Haiti and Jamaica (Tell My Horse, 1938); she wrote as an insider, in the voices of the people she studied, and her work, long neglected, is now read as a pioneering insider and gendered ethnography, alongside her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The field today includes the anthropology of masculinities, of sexuality and of transgender and non-binary lives, taken up in Unit X.

Poststructuralism accepted the structuralist insight that meaning comes from relations between signs but denied that any stable structure or centre holds those relations in place. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) introduced deconstruction in 1966–67 ("Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"; Of Grammatology): Western thought privileges one term of each binary — speech over writing, presence over absence — and meaning is endlessly deferred (différance); his critique was aimed partly at Lévi-Strauss, whose account of the Nambikwara "writing lesson" in Tristes Tropiques he read as a myth of innocent speech corrupted by writing. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) studied how discourses — regulated ways of speaking and knowing — produce the objects they speak of, and how power and knowledge are bound together ("power/knowledge"): The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975), with its model of the panopticon and disciplinary power, and The History of Sexuality (1976), which introduced biopower; his later lectures developed governmentality. Anthropologists used him to study the clinic, the prison, development, colonial classification and sexuality. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), who did fieldwork among the Kabyle of Algeria, is better called a theorist of practice than a postmodernist, but the syllabus groups him here: Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972; English 1977) sought to overcome the opposition of structure and agency through habitus — durable, embodied dispositions, "structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures" — acting within fields in which people compete for economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital; doxa is what goes without saying; Distinction (1979) showed how taste reproduces class. Postmodern anthropology took shape in Writing Culture (1986), edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, and Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986) by Marcus and Michael Fischer: ethnographies are texts, made with rhetorical devices, whose authority rests on the absent author's "being there"; the "crisis of representation" called for dialogic, polyphonic and reflexive writing and for experimental ethnography. Postcolonialism, drawing on Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) — the West's knowledge of the "Orient" as a discourse of domination — on the Subaltern Studies collective founded by Ranajit Guha (1982), and on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), questioned anthropology's colonial origins, which Talal Asad's collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) had already examined; Bernard Cohn traced how the colonial census and ethnographic survey helped fix caste and tribe as categories in India. Ethnicity, finally, is the social organisation of cultural difference. Max Weber defined ethnic groups as "human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration" — belief, not biology, is decisive. Fredrik Barth's introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) moved attention from "the cultural stuff that it encloses" to the boundary itself: ethnic groups are categories of ascription and self-ascription, maintained across boundaries through which people, goods and information constantly flow, and the cultural features that mark them may change while the boundary persists. Around these ideas the debate on ethnicity divides into primordialism (Edward Shils, 1957; Geertz's "primordial attachments", 1963), which stresses given ties of blood, language, religion and place; instrumentalism (Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa, 1969), which treats ethnicity as a resource mobilised in competition for power and resources; and constructivism, which sees ethnic identities as historically made and remade. The syllabus's "Jeffery" cannot be tied with confidence to one of these positions and is left unattributed here.