Section 4: Paragraph 5-7 Carmel Laniado

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.