An Anthropological Approach to Symbols

Outside Reading #2
"An Anthropologist's Reflections on Symbolic Usage" Raymond Firth

Firth talks about the Anthropological contribution to symbols as being "comparative, observationalist, functionalist and relatively neutralist." Anthropologists connect religious symbols to social structures, events and condition. They raise the importance of context and bring it back into the pictures, which seems all too often easily forgotten when thinking of something so specific and precise as a symbol.

Anthropolgists explain symbols with a heavy concentration on the cultures that they reflect and this further helps understand the meaning behind and the processes of life for certain groups of individuals.