Abstract

This book attempts to grant a clear insight into the problem of culture. Thinking about culture, we are faced with the inevitable, and apparently insuperable, problem of how to study culture in the absence of a consensual definition of this notion. For several reasons, the anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz provide an ideal starting point for tackling this issue. Firstly, both graduated in philosophy before turning to anthropology. Secondly, the linguistic-model-based approach they initiated is founded on the general belief that language is a feature which all men have in common. And thirdly, when taken together, the conclusions reached by Lévi-Strauss and Geertz, which contradict one another, yield a clear view on the conceptual complexity of culture.