Master Program: Language,

Communication & Society

The Interpretive Turn

Semester II: Spring 2021/2022
Professor: Abdelaaziz El Bakkali
Adel Ezzaouine

The variety of social structures, whereby societies bring their customs, rituals,
languages and traditions into practice the very authentic way they have sought
as “right” or at least suitable, obligates the presence of different ways whereby
to authentically describe, analyze and then understand these structures.
Anthropology -archaeology, anthropological linguistics, and ethnology- places itself
as the most adequate science through which both individuals and communities
can understand the whysom and the howsom of different social practices.
Thus, for a further scrutiny of these practices along with changes, there has
emerged the interpretive turn, after the linguistic antecedal, with all its”
insights of interpretive cultural anthropology, or ethnology, and in terms of
both subject matter and methodology” triggering “momentous changes in the
social sciences, humanities and cultural studies”.

The precedent approaches of social deciphering of some social structures and

behaviors are the very first factor of the emergence of interpretive
anthropology. The previous prevailing systems used to tackle human
phenomena through the concrete side of such structures, how they are
constructed, practiced, and why they are changed if done so. Conversely, the
rise of interpretive anthropology calls for the treating and understanding
culture through the reading of “texts” and their meanings, the text is meant to
be a symbol, an idea or even an assumption. Put differently, an “interpretive
explanation” is being sought: What meanings do institutions, actions, images,
events and customs have for those who themselves are bearers of these
institutions, actions, etc. (Geertz 1983: 22). Believing in Greetz’s viewpoint, a
study that brings the social practices under any analysis with a mere

1
observation is not authentic unless it covers the embedded “meanings” of
those structures and actions.

The functionality of culture in the interpretive turn is not of a paramount

importance as the concept of culture has become meaning-oriented. For
Greetz, “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has
spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not
an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of
meaning”. (Geertz 1975: 5); then , the notion of practices as functionalities
within societies as viewed and understood by social sciences, it is rather a
process of encoding and decoding among individuals producing meanings, or
the “fixation of meaning as Greetz refers to. Therefore, the practices, any
actions or events taking place within a community, are not as crucial as their
purports. For instance, the act of looking directly into the eyes of speaker is
considered a good gesture of respect in a Western context; contrarily enough,
by the same action is a lack of respect within another context, the Moroccan
one to exemplify. Thus, it is not the act that counts, it is the meaning ascribed
to that act that counts in the interpretive turn of anthropology that uses
different methodological approaches such as Synecdochic Mode,
Contextualization and Thick Description.

Culture in this interpretive turn is approached as a text which again roadmaps

the existence of countless readabilities and “going beyond its written form”. In
the wake of the interpretive turn, culture is to be regarded as an “ensemble of
texts”. A Greetz’z related definition of a text is as follows: “a structural
concept linked to the metaphor of a fabric. Such a text metaphor in no way
leads to the assertion that culture and text are to be equated – a widespread
misunderstanding”, this necessitates the presence of multilayered readings of
such a given culture “text” regarding the different contexts in which that text
was produced, assumed and then normally practiced. In this sense of the
interpretive turn, the text purport becomes detachable from the text as an
event.

In retrospect, it seems so astonishing to know about the emergence of the

interpretive turn in anthropology, a turn that has actually rang a bell about the

2
importance of meaning or meanings within a “text” as a culture. This approach
interprets the different segments of any given action and event within
contexts, the fact which calls for the use of different tools and techniques that
anthropology utilizes. However, since any representation is a
misrepresentation, we might dare to assert that any interpretation might be a
misinterpretation taking into account the rate of subjectivity within those
multilayered interpretations even if one truly tries to “deprovincialize”
meanings.

References:
Bachmann-Medick, D. (2016). Cultural turns: New orientations in the study of
culture.Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.