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SYMBOLISM: THE FOUNDATION OF CULTURE

Mary LeCron Foster (1994)

«Without symbolism there could be no culture. A symbol is an artefact: a ‘thing’ that exists out there somewhere in space and time. As a ‘thing’, a symbol has material reality and is experienced through the senses. It is a ‘thing’ that represents: that is culturally involved in such a way that it can be used in a multiplicity of contexts to convey meaning, not just about itself, but about cultural processes and relationships. Every symbol participates in a web of significances that we call culture. In other words, any symbol resonates with meaning. The meaning of a symbol is not a ‘thing’, and it can only be grasped inductively by observation of many instances of the social uses of that symbol, or similar symbols. It is only by observing praxis that ethnologists can discover cultural symbolic constructs, hence culture itself. Culture is not itself formed of symbols, but of the meaning that lies behind and unites symbols. This meaning only exists in the minds of participants in culture, but it is acted out through the manipulation of symbols, which objectify meaning. 

A single symbol is any entity that has socially participative meaning. Each symbol shares parts of its meaning with other symbols. It is this semantic resonance that underlies institutionalization, the preservation of socially constituted and conventionally manipulated networks of symbols. Culture is thus an elaborate system of classification whose units are symbols. It is a generalization from symbolic meanings shared within a society and realized during social interaction. 

The abstract system that is culture is founded on, and held together by, the human capacity to operate analogically. Networks of meaning constrain change in any part. This constraint contributes to cultural stability, but because the ability and drive to construct new analogies are omnipresent in the individual human biological heritage, change is also inevitable. Change is principally due to the creative human drive to readjust symbols—which means, in essence, to reorganize culturally transmitted analogical structures. Change was both slow and modest until the Upper Palaeolithic, which suggests that, until that time, symbolic organization was rudimentary.

The hallmark of culture, then, is institutionalization, founded upon classification, the symbolic organization of meaning. Each culture has evolved, and continues to evolve, through social experimentation in understanding, controlling, and utilizing, to its perceived advantage, sentient and insentient natural forces. The artefacts of culture, constituting the web that holds its institutions together, are symbols which are defined as the socially objectified loci of meaning.

Because symbols form a web of meaning for members of any given culture, no symbol has a meaning apart from the context of its relations with other symbols. To study symbolism it is necessary to examine and compare cultural contexts. This is the function of cultural anthropology. To understand symbolism as the foundation of culture it is also necessary to unravel the symbolic past.»