The Symbolic Content of India’s Culture
ANT 101 Cultural Anthropology
Omisha Banks
November 27, 2008
Professor Michelle Rogers
Abstract
Because culture is based on arbitrary symbols, a large but unknown amount of people’s cultural learning is unconscious and occurs as a normal part of life through observation. Though man and his life are symbolic, there are more evident symbols in man’s creations. Every culture symbolizes certain objects and communicates different meanings within and across cultures all over the world. Culture is based on arbitrary symbols, it must be learned in each context; therefore we think in symbols, we act in symbols; we live and learn in symbols.
The Symbolic Content of India’s Culture
Because culture is based on arbitrary symbols, it must be learned in each context. A symbol is an object, word or action with a culturally defined meaning that stands for something else with which it has no necessary or natural relationship. A large but unknown amount of people’s cultural learning is unconscious, occurring as a normal part of life through observation. Hearing stories and seeing performances of rituals and dramas are longstanding forms of cultural learning (Miller, 2007, p.18).
Though man and his life also ultimately are symbolic, there are more evident symbols in man’s creation. These symbols are the substitutes or suggestions of abstract things. A symbol reduces the enormous complexity of communication by using a concrete sign as a kind of shorthand for complex interrelated concepts, ideas, and values systems. The larger the collective to be held together by the symbol, the more complex is the signification process, that is, the process of attaining a meaning to a symbol to which all members or subsets of the group can subscribe. Because of this, symbols make the easy transmission of culture possible. (http://www.crvp.org/seminar/05-seminar/bala.htm)
Stressing the significance of symbols in the cultural life of human...