Culture as communication
This last view of culture is in some sense a return to the semiotic notion of culture as communication, this view holds that culture is a system of signs and meanings. A way of making sense of reality by objectifying it in stories, myths, descriptions, theories, proverbs, artistic performances, rituals, and so on. This perspective, particularly prominent in anthropology since the work of Clifford Geertz, emphasizes that humans do not simply react to the material world, but create symbolic systems through which they interpret and organize experience. To believe or know something, from this perspective, is to be able to participate in a system of communication. Lévi-Strauss and the semiotic approach One of the earliest examples of the view of culture as communication is found in the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to him, cultures are sign systems that express deeply held cognitive distinctions and do so in terms of binary oppositions (Leach 1970; Lévi-St...