symbol

Most generally, any act or thing which represents something else. More particularly, the smallest meaning-unit in the semantic fields of rituals , dream, or myth . In psychoanalysis , a symbol is an act or object representing a repressed unconscious desire. Symbols usually signify many things; that is, to use Victor Turner's phrase (The Forest of Symbols, 1967), they are multi-vocal . The link between symbol and referent is not always arbitrary, as with sign, but may be motivated by an association of attributes (for example, the crown as a symbol of monarchy).

Much of the research on symbolism has been done by social anthropologists rather than sociologists. For example, in Purity and Danger (1966), the British anthropologist Mary Douglas uses cross-cultural examples, including Hinduism, the Old Testament, and Western beliefs in hygiene, to argue that dirt is the symbol for matter out of place in a society's classification system. Clifford Geertz, the American cultural anthropologist and noted proponent of symbolic anthropology, has argued that human behaviour is fundamentally symbolic and therefore laden with meaning for social actors. The primary task of the ethnographer is to understand the ‘webs of significance’ which people themselves have spun. Thus, for Geertz, anthropology (and by implication sociology) is not an experimental science, looking for universal laws, but an interpretative science in search of meaning.’Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ (in Daedalus, 1972) is a classic example of Geertz's symbolic analysis. See also Saussure, Ferdinand de; semiology ; symbolic interactionism.