One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.
[This]....view of culture begins with the assumption that human thought is basically both social and public—that its natural habitat is the house yard, the marketplace, and the town square. Thinking consists not of "happenings in the head" (though happenings there and elsewhere are necessary for it to occur) but of a traffic in what have been called, by G. H. Mead and others, significant symbols—words for the most part but also gestures, drawings, musical sounds, mechanical devices like clocks, or natural objects like jewels—anything, in fact, that is disengaged from its mere actuality and used to impose meaning upon experience. From the point of view of any particular individual, such symbols are largely given. He finds them already current in the community when he is born, and they remain, with some additions, subtractions, and partial alterations he may or may not have had a hand in, in circulation after he dies. While he lives he uses them, or some of them, sometimes deliberately and with care, most often spontaneously and with ease, but always with the same end in view: to put a construction upon the events through which he lives, to orient himself within "the ongoing course of experienced things," to adopt a vivid phrase of John Dewey's.
Clifford Geertz from "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man"
"anything, in fact, that is disengaged from its mere actuality and used to impose meaning upon experience" I like this portion of the citation a lot, it reminds me of Dewey's discussion of tools in E&N. I also wonder if Geertz explores the use of these, spontaneously and with ease, but without thought or consciousness. I've been interested in thinking on paradigms in culture, and wide awakeness to when and how we use these tools, and when and how they seem to use us.
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