Briefly discuss 

why symbols are so central in Geertz's understanding of culture. 

According to Clifford Geertz, Culture is articulated by the external symbols that a society uses rather than being
inaccessible inside people’s heads. He defined culture as a historically transmitted pattern of meanings
embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men
communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life. Societies use
these symbols to express their worldview, value-orientation, attitude, and other aspects of their culture.

For Geertz symbols are vehicles of ‘culture', and he asserts that symbols should not be studied in and of
themselves, but for what they can reveal about culture. Geertz’s main interest was manner in which symbols
shape the ways that social actors see, feel, and think about the world.

Throughout his writings, Geertz characterized culture as a social phenomenon and a shared system of
intersubjective symbols and meanings. In The Interpretation of Culture, an enormously influential compilation
of his essays, he argued that an analysis of culture should “not [be] an experimental science in search of law
but an interpretive one in search of meaning”.

Symbolic anthropology studies the way people understand their surroundings, as well as the actions and
utterances of the other members of their society. These interpretations form a shared cultural system of
meaning–i.e., understandings shared, to varying degrees, among members of the same society. According to
Clifford Geertz, humans are in need of symbolic “sources of illumination” to orient themselves with respect to
the system of meaning that is any particular culture.