Cultural Anthropology of Clifford Geertz in the Context of the Contemporary Theory of Ideologies

The article reveals the significance of the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz for the modern theory of ideologies. It analyzes the general philosophical premises and the socio-philosophical context of the cultural-semiotic approach to understanding ideology. Geertz's main arguments against the dominant (post-Marxist and structuralist) interpretations of the phenomenon of ideology are analyzed. Geertz's interpretation of ideology is based on a semiotic understanding of culture as a set of extragenetic programs that govern the behavior of a human as a “symbolic animal”. In the context of Geertz's cultural anthropology, aspects of ideology that remained undisclosed in the framework of other research programs (structuralist, neo-Marxist, post-Marxist) come to the fore. Ideology within the framework of the cultural-semiotic approach appears as a system of interrelated symbols and meanings that set an integral context for the interpretation of various phenomena of sociopolitical life. Ideology can be likened to a map of a problematic social reality. The cultural-semiotic approach rehabilitates ideology as a subject of social research and allows one to develop a non-judgmental, non-ideologized concept of ideology. One of the main advantages of the cultural-semiotic approach in comparison with post-Marxist and post-Freudian research strategies is the consistent distinction between the scientific and ideological perspectives of the consideration of ideology. Geertz's interpretation convincingly shows that the scientific study of ideology cannot be reduced to the task of criticizing ideology, exposing it as “false consciousness” that distorts social reality. Ideology and social science within the framework of the cultural-semiotic approach are not opposed, but they are not identified either; they are viewed as different languages and special symbolic forms of culture existing in parallel for describing and explaining social reality.

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