There is a very interesting,
fascinating book written
by this great anthropologist Clifford Geertz.
Clifford Geertz published in 1973
a very important book, which is entitled
“The interpretation of culture”
in which Geertz is pointing that culture
doesn’t mean national character
as it is commonly said
but is a system of meanings,
that’s to say the meanings,
which are shared among a society
and by which individuals
are able to understand each other.
And Geertz is pointing
that individuals in a group
are weaving this system of meanings
of which they are then depending on.
So this system of meanings is probably
the best way for understanding
what culture means,
and he is pointing on the fact that
a society is possible with cleavages,
with a plurality of values,
but it’s not possible without a code,
that’s to say a common system of meanings.
By which politics doesn’t mean,
in Arab word for instance,
what it means in Western countries.
The meaning of political institutions
is changing according to the history,
that’s to say according to the culture
of societies and nations.
But the real problem now
is to consider that there is
no homogeneous cultural spaces
and that in a society there is
a permanent hybridization
between different kinds of cultures.
That’s why culture
is not making a territory
and in a territory
are coexisting different kinds of cultures.
The last concept is identity crisis.
What is an identity crisis?
Something very clear, that’s to say
when there is no coincidence
between the imagined community
as Benedict Anderson said,
and the real community,
when you are living in a system
which doesn’t coincide
to the imagined community
to which you consider to belong.