Section 4: Paragraph 5-7 Carmel Laniado

Hi Carmel, I agree with you that Greetz push us to a further understanding of the symbols as we are in different culture or agency. As a child, they would not consider the deeper meaning of the symbols until we learn through institutions or even social media as we grow up. But one question comes up on my head, as we learned all these deeper meaning of the symbols, does it bring any benefit to the society as these hand motion or other physical posture are created? I think sometimes the symbols would make things more complicated when we try to express our self clearly to people. With the more complex way to send out the message, will people really get it or they just roughly get what you mean?

Hi Rachel, I would agree with you that the gestures, simple expression of condensed meanings, can possibly cause misunderstanding and vagueness, when used between people who do not share the same cultural context, hence, cannot communicate clearly through that specific gesture. It is, however, important to notice that among people within a certain cultural context, body languages that are commonly shared and frequently used as efficient means of communication. People would clearly interpret what it means as those people in that certain culture have been using that gesture to communicate the specific meanings. As Geertz claims, knowing a specific, accurate 'meaning' of a body motion allows people to effectively communicate.

I really think Aram made a good point that gestures are strongly connected with contents. I just want to add that even if the gestures that are not commonly recognized by people, we are still able to interpret, because contents really explain it to us. For example, when I drive through a construction site, the person with stop sign often doing some random waving gestures, but for drivers, they can tell whether and where they should go. Because the content is based on a construction site.

I agree with both of you when you say that when trying to find a deeper meaning to the symbols that we may misinterpret the original message as put forth by the symbol. Having said that though, I still feel like the onus lies on the person who is doing the interpreting, i.e. an ethnographer, to find the meaning behind the symbols. As well as that, creating a debate regarding the meaning of certain symbols is also not necessarily a bad thing. Geertz also tells us that using just the thin description, which is what we would take certain actions at face value, is quite misleading. Without digging deeper into the interpretation of the symbols, the correlations that may be discovered may be false.

Hi, Rachel! Thanks for an interesting question. I agree with you that symbols sometimes make things more complicated when expressing ourselves to others. On that note, I understand why you would ask whether symbols would aid or distract people from understanding the meaning behind it. How I look at it is this: symbols are somewhat double-sided in that it may act as a way to aid some people's understanding while disabling others'. In other words, symbols may be used to enable a more secretive group communication and bonding, enabling the participating members to understand each other more efficiently while disabling non-members from really getting the message being delivered and/or shared.