Symbols That Stand for Themselves

Politics & Social Sciences

Roy Wagner

Anthropology

University of Chicago Press

The Invention of Culture, one of the most important works in symbolic anthropology in recent years, argues that culture is not a given that shapes the lives of the people who share it. Rather, it is people who shape their culture by constantly manipulating conventional symbols taken from a variety of everchanging codes to create new meanings. Wagner sees culture arising from the dialectic between the individual and the social world; his analysis is situated in the relation between invention and convention, innovation and control, meaning and context. Finally, the author points out that the symbolization processes that generate the construction of meaning in culture are the same as those that anthropologists use to "invent" the cultures they study.

The invention of culture (A Phoenix book)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roy Wagner. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Roy Wagner

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roy Wagner. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Symbols That Stand for Themselves

The invention of culture (A Phoenix book)