Knowledge

Category: Fields of research

Sociology of Knowledge

The sociology of knowledge examines how ideas, beliefs, and knowledge are shaped by social and historical conditions rather than existing independently of society. As a branch of sociology, it explores how the mental life of individuals and groups develops within the institutions, cultures, and social relationships in which they live. While initially focused on formal systems of knowledge and ideology, the field has expanded to include the informal, taken-for-granted knowledge that guides everyday life.

The term Wissenssoziologie (sociology of knowledge) was introduced in the 1920s by Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim. Emerging in post-World War I Germany, the field responded to political conflict and competing ideologies in Weimar society. Influenced by the philosophical traditions of Marx, Nietzsche, and German historicism, Scheler and Mannheim sought to understand how political beliefs and worldviews reflected particular historical and social circumstances. Although they differed in their views on truth and relativism, both argued that knowledge cannot be separated from the social and historical contexts in which it is produced.

The sociology of knowledge also reflected a broader intellectual shift away from traditional epistemology towards understanding knowledge as a social phenomenon. It became a framework for explaining how ideas emerge, gain authority, and change over time.

Different national traditions developed distinctive approaches. The French tradition, influenced by Durkheim, emphasised social structures; the German tradition focused on Marxist and Mannheimian theories of ideology; and the American tradition, shaped by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, stressed pragmatism and the social nature of mind. Overall, the sociology of knowledge provides a framework for analysing how social conditions shape knowledge, including sociological theories themselves, which are understood as products of the historical and political contexts in which they were developed.

Knowledge in the Perspective of Historicism and German Formalism

As previously noted, German historicism influenced the development of the sociology of knowledge. Some of the most influential authors in the tradition of historicism are Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber.

Instead of an objective study of society, Dilthey introduces the principle of a subjective approach to society. It is not possible to study society with the help of causal logic; it can be achieved only through interpretations, that is, the interpretation of phenomena. The key to his approach is the ability of the researcher to understand the inner mental states of others. To achieve scientific knowledge, it is necessary to use a combination of intuition and systematic application of interpretive methods. The experience of the researcher enables him to achieve a union of the subject and the object of research.

For Dilthey, understanding (Verstehen) means using our own mental life to connect with other people's minds. Meaning can be given to ideas, activities, or experiences. The socio-historical world represents the world of our shared experience. The meaning depends on the assumption that we all share, in essence, the same human nature. Meaning is always contextual; it represents the relationship of the whole with the parts. The process of interpretation begins with a principled understanding of the subject of study as a whole, which leads us to understand the meaning of the parts, which, in turn, allows us to see the whole more clearly. This closes the hermeneutic circle. Mentally placing ourselves in the situation of another person allows us to understand the thoughts and actions of that other person (his or her experience), but also to understand the socio-historical world.

Max Weber claimed that the scientific study of social action requires the application of the cognitive method of „understanding“ (verstehen). Understanding is made possible by the fact that there is an identity between the subject (researcher) and the object (individual that is studied) of cognition, and therefore understanding has a higher degree of clarity and certainty compared to other forms and methods of cognition. The identity of the subject and the object of knowledge, in essence, means that scientists, as well as people whose work is the object of the study, have similar psychology. This is what enables scientists to understand the subjective meaning that social action has for the person who performs the social action. Understanding has both an intellectual and an emotional component. This means that we can understand the rational aspect of one's social actions, while at the same time understanding the emotional motives of that social action. Understanding social action, as a sociological method, allows us to create causal explanations of individual events. On the other hand, creating causal explanations of complex processes requires the application of a comparative-historical method, while a thought experiment also serves as a research aid.

Alfred Weber (Max Weber’s brother) developed his distinct approach to knowledge. He argues that civilization consists of three sub-areas: the intellectually formed image of the world and the ego, the cosmos of pragmatic knowledge, and the intellectual tools for mastering life (technical knowledge). These three parts of civilization and the civilization process are only aspects of the same developmental logic. When the process of civilization begins to move in a certain direction, it continues to move strictly following that developmental logic. Knowledge and intellectual ideas that are acquired in the process of civilization are "pre-existent" phenomena. This means that this knowledge and these ideas are not "created", but only "discovered". Science and technology only reveal facts about the outside world, which already existed before and were waiting to be "discovered". Scientific knowledge and technical discoveries, unlike cultural emanations, can be fully transferred to other historical areas.

George Simmel argued that we understand other people as objects of our notions, creating them to some extent, using different categories. These categories represent the basis of sociological knowledge. There are three such categories: 1) abstraction of individual characteristics of persons in order to classify them into different general and a priori categories. Such categories are classes, races, professions, and the like. 2) Reserve of personality - the personal psychic life of an individual that cannot be reported from any general category, and that area is a subject of psychology and history. The two sides of the individual, social and personal, influence each other; the personality is a product of society, while, on the other hand, the personality determines the reaction of the individual to social influences. The end product of this relationship is the achievement of personality unity. 3) The third category enables the unification of the first two.

Knowledge in the Perspective of Marxism

Karl Marx developed the theoretical approach to ideology that was extremely influential to the sociology of knowledge. Marx claimed the relations of production in capitalism create a specific type of social superstructure, that is, capitalist ideology that aims to justify and legitimize existing relations of production and capitalist exploitation and domination. The capitalist class, with its ideology that uses the ideas of equality and freedom, manages to disguise, to other members of society, the basis of exploitation and domination on which that class rests. However, equality, freedom, and civil rights are an illusion, because the worker is neither free nor equal to the capitalist. The worker is not free, because he is forced to work for the capitalist in order to survive. The worker is not equal either, because all political power and ideological narrative are created and held by the capitalist class. That is why Marx sees ideology as a „false consciousness“, that is, a false image of society and the world.

György Lukács, in His book History and Class Consciousness (1923), uses Marxist concepts to analyze the production of knowledge in bourgeois society. He argues that bourgeois science constantly observes phenomena from the point of view of the individual and that such a view cannot produce knowledge of totality, but only fragmentary knowledge. That is why bourgeois science divides totality into several special sciences. The fragmentation that occurs with the subject is conditioned by the fragmentation of production, the division of labor, and the hierarchical structure of the labor market. It is the logic of capital that creates consciousness, not individual perception or understanding. Lukács intended to create a philosophical basis for the establishment of true revolutionary class consciousness, so he wants to overcome Kant's view according to which it is not possible to achieve objective knowledge of reality. Social and historical facts gain real meaning only when they are integrated into the whole (totality). Only subjects, who are totalities themselves, can understand totality, and in modern society total subjects can only be classes. The category of totality is the essence of the revolutionary principle in science. The ultimate goal of socialism is the attitude towards totality, that is, society that is understood as a process, through which every aspect of the struggle gains its revolutionary significance.

Scheler’s Sociology of Knowledge

In The Forms of Knowledge and Society (1925), Max Scheler introduced the concept of a society’s “relatively natural worldview” (Weltanschauung), an idea that remains influential in cultural sociology. He also made important contributions to understanding the development of the modern worldview and the values underpinning scientific thought. A key aspect of Scheler’s work was his emphasis on the importance of situated, practical forms of knowledge rather than viewing universal scientific knowledge as the only legitimate source of understanding.

Scheler’s theory centres on a non-formal conception of values as the foundation for understanding both human personality and social life. He argued that human actions are guided by an ordered hierarchy of values, which individuals recognise through an intuitive sense of preference rather than through logical reasoning. Scheler referred to this hierarchy as the ordo amoris (“order of love”), describing it as having an a priori character. This means that the recognition of values exists independently of particular experiences, while the fundamental hierarchy of values remains constant. However, how people prioritise and express these values in everyday life is shaped by historical change and differs across social and cultural contexts. Consequently, although the underlying structure of values is stable, its practical expression varies according to the time, place, and society in which people live.

Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge

Karl Mannheim’s article "The Problem of the Sociology of Knowledge" (1925) and the book Ideology and Utopia (1929) established him as one of the founders and the most influential authors in the field of sociology of knowledge. His work was influenced by many sociologists and philosophers: Lukács, Heinrich Rickert, Max Weber, Alfred Weber, Karl Marx, and Georg Simmel. Mannheim defined the sociology of knowledge as the study of “the relationship between human thought and the conditions of existence in general.” The two main theses of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge are: 1) the validity of the practical application of knowledge is relative to its capacity to provide legitimacy to social order; 2) the social conditionality of knowledge (knowledge that standard methodological criteria assess as valid) can be examined by examining whether the practical application of that knowledge reproduces and/or creates the standards themselves, through which (standards) the validity of that knowledge is assessed.

Mannheim considered Marx to be the forerunner of the sociology of knowledge. In his approach to the sociology of knowledge, Mannheim advocates an extrinsic perspective, that is, the perspective of an impartial sociologist. He emphasized the importance of empirical research on the sociology of knowledge because the activities of individual actors represent a link between the empirical social world and knowledge. In addition, he emphasized the importance of historical research in discovering how social conditions create knowledge, but also how knowledge and ideas condition social change. His approach was not positivist but based on phenomenology and historicism. Phenomenology questions the applicability of formal logic and, instead, seeks to understand intrinsically how individuals experience the world and how that image affects their social experience. Historicism emphasizes the view that different ways of knowing are characteristic of the historical circumstances in which they arose.

Mannheim believed that there was a big difference between relativism and relationalism. While relativism views all knowledge as relative, and therefore there are no universal ways to assess the validity of knowledge, on the other hand, relationalism believes that all phenomena are interconnected and that there is a possibility of assessing the validity of knowledge in relation to a particular social situation and historical moment. Mannheim was an advocate of relationalism because this approach gives the possibility of reaching the truth, while at the same time accepting the particularity of such knowledge concerning the context in which it arises. Relationalism enables the sociology of knowledge to create knowledge that can be used in a normative or non-normative way. He believes that the inadequacy of a normative order stems from an attempt to apply norms that were once applicable, but do not apply to changed historical circumstances.

One of the key concepts of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge is "worldview" (Weltanschauung), a term that denotes the set of all ideas that exist in a historical period or in a social group. The worldview is in a constant process of creation and change. The ideas that make up the worldview represent a system whose parts are reciprocally interconnected, and thus, the worldview represents more than the simple sum of its constituent parts. Each idea within the worldview can be analyzed separately to better understand the whole. Mannheim singles out three ways in which one can approach the meaning that exists within the worldview of society: 1) objective meaning - intrinsic meaning that is explored objectively, without entering into one's motives; 2) expressive meaning - extrinsic or symbolic meaning, which pays attention to the motives of the actors; and 3) documentary meaning - is the product of the interpretation of external observers. Documentary meaning is the best basis for an analysis focused on understanding how an individual idea fits into a broader worldview.

Mannheim's approach to ideology stems from his sociology of knowledge. Mannheim's sociology of cognition is largely based on a critique of Marx's view of ideology and other patterns of the social superstructure. Marx believed that the real (material) social conditions of existence shape the social superstructure. Ideology, as part of a social superstructure, represents a conscious attempt by the ruling class to create a false image of reality, to protect its own power and interests. On the other hand, Mannheim believed that certain social groups create distorted images of reality without the conscious intention to establish hegemonic control; instead, such images are a product of the living conditions of that group, and therefore reflect their image of the world and protect their interests. The sources of such ideologies can be different, from economic to generational, racial, gender, etc. Ideology, in his opinion, is a type of worldview that uses the past to create a distorted image of the present.

Stark Werner and the Sociology of Knowledge

Werner Stark’s The Sociology of Knowledge (1958) sought to redefine the sociology of knowledge by moving beyond the Marx–Mannheim tradition and its emphasis on ideology. Rather than focusing on how ideas are distorted by class interests or false consciousness, Stark argued that the sociology of knowledge should examine how all forms of knowledge are socially and historically determined. He believed that truths cannot exist independently of the social and historical contexts in which they emerge, making the sociology of knowledge essential for understanding both the development of ideas and their claims to truth.

Influenced by the traditions of German cultural sociology and Wissenssoziologie, Stark drew on the work of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and especially Max Scheler. From Scheler, he adopted the view that it is possible to identify enduring values and truths within socially relative realities. Stark’s central concern was to explain how human experience becomes conscious, meaningful, and communicable through socially situated forms of knowledge. Ultimately, he sought to develop a theory that could reconcile different styles of thought and reveal the partial truths contained within each.

A major feature of Stark’s argument is his rejection of ideology as the foundation of the sociology of knowledge. He argued that the Marx–Mannheim tradition focused too narrowly on how social conditions produce error, deception, or false consciousness. In contrast, Stark maintained that the sociology of knowledge should investigate the broader process of the social determination of knowledge—the idea that all knowledge is shaped by historical and social conditions, not merely distorted by them. This approach allows sociology to study the social origins of both valid and invalid knowledge, rather than concentrating only on ideological error.

Stark believed that the concept of social determination was fully compatible with the pursuit of truth, whereas theories of ideology primarily explained misunderstanding and bias. Although he acknowledged that ideology remained an important topic for sociology and intellectual history, he argued that it should not define the sociology of knowledge.

Knowledge in the Perspectives of Phenomenology and Social Constructionism

Alfred Schütz developed the theoretical approach known as phenomenology. Schütz sought to resolve inconsistencies in Weber's use of "subjective meaning" and further develop his methods of "understanding" (Verstehen) and ideal types. Schütz used Bergson's analysis of "duration", as a stream of conscious experience that represents the link between subjective and objective knowledge, Husserl's analysis of "internal time-consciousness" (inneren Zeitbewusstseins), and a similar concept of "stream of consciousness", which was introduced by William James, as a basis for elaborating Weber's most important concepts, and above all, the concept of subjective meaning.

With his approach, Schütz sought to provide a developmental theory of human action and to create a theoretical model of the life world that could encompass multiple levels of reality arising from subjective meaning and intersubjectivity. This theory of action seeks to provide answers to three key questions: 1) how is meaningfully oriented human action created? 2) how can people understand other people? and 3) how is common socially valid knowledge created? In the context of such a theory of human action, the subject of sociology would be: the conscious and meaningful activities of individuals through which they try to give meaning to reality and thus create and transform the social world (life-world).

Schütz argues that individual personal experience is not available to sociologists, because they cannot explain all the specifics of the process during which that person reconstructed his own experience. The social sciences can only build analytical models that use shared typologies (typologies that are common to all or a large number of actors) in order to understand the experience and motives of an actor. That method Schütz called „typification“. Schütz wanted to use the approach of methodological individualism, which takes the activities of individuals as the starting point of sociological analysis, in order to build a general theory of human action. Schütz applied the ideal-typological method used by Weber to the process of typifying subjective knowledge and life-world.

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) argues that reality is not simply given or natural but is created and sustained through human social interaction. Drawing on the ideas of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Schütz, and Mead, they challenge the dominant structural-functionalist approach in U.S. sociology, which they believed placed too much emphasis on social structures and too little on the active role of people in creating and maintaining society.

Rather than asking philosophical questions such as “What is real?” or “How do we know reality?”, Berger and Luckmann focus on how groups of people come to define certain ideas, practices, and institutions as real within specific historical and social contexts. They argue that sociology should examine what counts as “knowledge” in any society, regardless of whether that knowledge is objectively true or false. Different societies construct different realities, and these variations can only be understood by examining the social processes that produce, sustain, and transform them.

The authors credit Marx with the foundational insight that human consciousness is shaped by social existence, particularly through shared labour and the social relationships it creates. They reinterpret Marx’s concepts of substructure and superstructure as human activity and the social world produced through that activity. However, Berger and Luckmann extend this insight by making the social construction of reality the central concern of the sociology of knowledge.

Their theory also draws heavily on Durkheim and Weber. From Durkheim, they adopt the idea that social facts should be treated as objective realities, even though they are created by people. From Weber, they emphasise the importance of understanding the subjective meanings that individuals attach to their actions. Together, these perspectives suggest that social reality emerges through meaningful human action but eventually takes on an objective, taken-for-granted character. This process is captured in their well-known statement: “Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product.”

The influence of Alfred Schütz and George Herbert Mead is equally important. Schütz’s phenomenology highlights the everyday world as the setting where reality is continuously produced through routine practices and shared understandings. Mead’s symbolic interactionism emphasises that language and shared meanings enable people to coordinate action, shape identities, and sustain social life.

Finally, Berger and Luckmann stress that institutions and symbolic systems require ongoing legitimation and maintenance. Language and shared knowledge provide coherence to everyday life, but every symbolic universe remains potentially unstable and must be continually reinforced by the people who inhabit it. For this reason, sociologists should always ask who defines reality and whose interests those definitions serve, recognising that all social realities are ultimately human creations grounded in everyday life.

Knowledge in the Perspective of Feminist Epistemology

Feminist Epistemology, also known as standpoint epistemology, was developed in the 1980s and 1990s by feminist sociologists such as Donna Haraway, Dorothy E. Smith, Nancy Hartsock, Christine Delphy, Patricia Collins and Sandra Harding. Donna Haraway states that science is not able to build unique knowledge that is not conditioned by social institutions, relationships, and values. In addition, science has most often served to justify and strengthen existing social hierarchies. That is why Haraway advocates situational knowledge and gives priority to different perspectives that arise within different communities. Science should be the product of a specific context and a specific moment. The author also criticizes standard science for its constant need to introduce dichotomies, such as culture/nature, male/female, man/animal, and man/machine. Haraway thus joins other postmodern epistemologists who advocated the multiplicity of perspectives and the criticized futility of building a completely "objective science".

Dorothy E. Smith studied the ways of acquiring knowledge about society, and concluded that, although official sociology is presented as a rational and objective science, sociology, at the same time, excludes the experience of women and thus provides a distorted picture of social relations. Sociological knowledge is gained from the positions and views of men and creates, as the author calls them, "relations of ruling", which are a set of organized practices and discourses of the state, companies, and professional and educational organizations, which permeate multiple locations of power. Sociology overlooked both the female experience of everyday life and the female position within the macro context of capitalist society.

Nancy Hartsock believes that the relations of power and domination are always connected with epistemology, so she wants to build an alternative approach to epistemology and ontology, which would connect the knowledge and everyday life experience of discriminated groups. This is how standpoint epistemology developed. She believes that social relations, and our position within them, structure the ways we understand the world and shape the concepts and categories we use.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in the book Epistemology of the Closet (1990), states that the central link between all thoughts and knowledge in Western culture in the twentieth century was the binary division into homosexual/heterosexual. This binary division serves as a source of information about sexuality, but also about all other social institutions. “Closet” in her theory refers not only to hiding homosexuality but to all human desires that are hidden or invisible.

Collins developed an African-American feminist epistemology that emphasizes the importance of self-defined knowledge for group empowerment. Empowerment is necessary in order to leave the matrix of domination. Empowerment will come with the development of personal responsibility, experiential wisdom, feminist discourse, and empathy. Empowerment of African American women cannot take place as long as there is discrimination and social exclusion. Collins believes that only the experience and knowledge gained by vulnerable groups, especially African-Americans, can provide critical and self-defining resistance.

Harding’s epistemology starts from the assumption that women's multiple and contradictory identities and social positions should serve as an epistemological resource. True knowledge can only be created by studying the oppressed and deprived, as well as by examining a specific female experience that is very different from the experience and worldview that men have. The different experiences and worldviews that women have allow us to create a specific insight into the way society works. She sees gender as a product of experience and practice. Gender differences in identities, experiences, and practices cause gender differences in knowledge.

Knowledge in the Perspective of Postmodernism

Michael Foucault, in the books Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1963), presents his "archaeological" method, which is based on the ideas of French structuralism by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. Archeology, as an epistemological approach and an empirical and theoretical method, seeks to unravel the history of discourse that is institutionalized and that organizes knowledge. The goal is to discover the hidden structures and rules that organize discourse and knowledge. The archaeology of knowledge seeks to rediscover the micro elements of discontinuous and disqualified knowledge. Modernity produces societies based on discipline, oversight, and normalization of practice through discourse. Discourse is spread and controlled by institutions and their specialists, teachers, judges, and psychiatrists. Discourse is analyzed as historical and specific to a particular social group and its practice. In addition, Foucault seeks to discover how these discursive formations, over time, come to be seen as natural and common sense.

Foucault expanded his field of research and further developed his structuralist-inspired method in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966). Foucault's goal is to discover the structural codes of knowledge that govern various scientific fields - biology, philology, political economy, etc. He seeks to show how classification systems in different cultures and different historical periods are equally arbitrary and strange. Western culture has gone through three distinct historical periods: the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and Modernity. Each epoch is governed by a unique "episteme" - an implicit internal structure that structures the way people think. Epistemes organize knowledge, not in relation to some objective and rational criteria, but in relation to the arbitrary structural codes of knowledge. Foucault seeks to unravel discursive knowledge that regulates the way of thinking and speaking, that gives rules of what is right and what is not, and what is generally considered to be knowledge. The key to the production of epistemes is the actions of institutions because they produce and control access to knowledge. This kind of discourse is fluid, but still stable enough during one epoch that it can be viewed as a structure. Foucault does not want to use the archaeological method to determine some "quasi-continuity" between different epochs but to reveal how each epoch, in its own way, organizes knowledge and turns human subjects into objects of knowledge.

Jean-François Lyotard argues that “metanarratives” control how knowledge is created, evaluated, and organized. Examples of metanarratives are Enlightenment rationalism or the Marxist belief in the replacement of capitalism by the dictatorship of the proletariat. These metanarratives are based on the nostalgic need for the organic unity of society. Postmodernism has led to the rejection of metanarratives as totalizing knowledge that imposes absolute truths. Instead, postmodernism brings many paths to truth and the creation of new narratives that will resist metanarratives. Relativity and uncertainty are accepted, and knowledge is always seen as incomplete. Universal standards and criteria are rejected, and multiple paradigms are introduced. Knowledge is becoming decentralized because the fight against metanarratives and bureaucratized science and technology is being waged at the micro level. In addition, there is resistance to the centralized power of the modern state and the dominance of multinational companies.

Deconstruction, the philosophical current that Jacques Derrida started, seeks to reveal instabilities and inconsistencies in Western intellectual traditions. Western culture tends to seek absolute truths and meanings, and it is deconstruction that tends to challenge that absolute knowledge, as a philosophical and literary method of criticism. Derrida calls the search for absolute truths and meanings "transcendental signified" because such knowledge is presented as universal knowledge, which can be translated into any language and context. The desire to discover absolute truths is also called "logocentrism", which is associated with "phonocentrism", the practice of valuing speech more than the written word. Derrida believes that all the processes of signification represent the form of the written word, and that fact undermines the presumed unity of language and meaning in speech.

Habermas and Knowledge

In several books written in the mid-1960s, such as Theory and Practice (1963), Knowledge and Human Interest (1968a), and Technology and Science as Ideology (1968b), Jürgen Habermas expresses his dissatisfaction with the dominance of the positivist approach in epistemology and methodology of the social sciences at that time. Habermas studies the relationship between types of knowledge and what he calls "a priori interests." Interests or fundamental orientations are related to the conditions of reproduction and the organization of humanity. There are three such fundamental interests: control (prediction), understanding, and emancipation. Each of these interests corresponds to a specific type of knowledge. Empirical analytical knowledge tends to fulfill the interest of control and prediction; hermeneutics serves the interest of understanding; while critical theory creates knowledge related to the interest of emancipation. The essence of Habermas's critique of positivism is that this approach recognizes legitimacy only for empirical analytical knowledge, and thus completely delegitimizes the other two types of knowledge. Critical theory seeks to achieve emancipation by combining empirical analytical and hermeneutical knowledge to remove existing social constraints.

Knowledge and Anthropology

In The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrates that the minds of indigenous peoples work like a jack-of-all-trades or Swiss army knife, having a mental non-specialized toolkit. Folklore, myths, and other knowledge of these people serve to organize and engage with the physical and cultural world, and those knowledge systems are well adapted to their specific needs. Frederik Barth, in Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea (1975), researched the male rite of passage rituals that involved initiation into a secret male cult, where boys achieved manhood, social recognition, and sacred knowledge. After undergoing initiation himself, Barth discovered the world full of symbolism, myths, knowledge, and non-verbal communication.

Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), rejects all universal theories used in anthropology, like Marxism, structuralism, structural-functionalism, and others. For him, anthropology isn't an experimental science that searches for laws, but it is an interpretive endeavor that searches for meaning in symbolic and signifying systems. The goal of anthropology is to discover the conceptual structures that motivate the actions of the subject and to construct a system of analysis. The analysis is the classification of structures of meaning and the determination of their social basis and meaning. Geertz reinterpreted Weber’s concept of Verstehen as “webs of significance in which individuals are caught”, and those webs of significance are crucial for Geertz’s understanding of culture. Meanings are not contained in some abstract symbolic systems, as Lévi-Strauss thought, but are found in the ‘ongoing patterns of life’, that is, in observable interactions, practices, and rituals. All those observable actions signify public symbolic knowledge, and the researcher has to interpret that symbolic meaning through the method that Geertz calls „thick description“. The thick description focuses on the „emic“ significance of social action. For him, every culture is unique, and that should be presented to the reader, and in that sense, culture should be “read as a text”. That text should be understood in a native, that is, emic cultural context, so the reader could learn and understand the local meaning.

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