Geertz’s groundbreaking collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), narrows the definition of culture by wedding it to semiotics, the study of signs. Otherwise, it would follow the fate of other useful concepts that have fallen out of vogue and become anachronistic. In order to preserve the usefulness of this concept, he claimed, culture needed to be limited, specified, focused, and contained.
He called the confusion over how to define culture a “conceptual morass” (4). In the 1970s, however, Anthropologist Clifford Geertz saw that the diffuse way other Anthropologists and ethnographers defined culture began to obscure its usefulness. It helped establish the discipline and remains a generative way to talk about and understand human life. The notion of culture has been enormously useful to Anthropology.
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