Nietzsche's Corner

Originally posted by dottewell
Could you explain that in simple language?

I thought that was simple, if you check Geertz out on the net you may find it explained in a much clearer way?

I guess the most famous extraction of Nietzschean philosophy within the socail sciences was through Michel Foucault (the post modern philosopher) who mainly focussed on power relations. he called himself a Nietzschean genealogist, and started to extract genealogies form history as data to enforce his own line of thought...

Originally posted by Vladamir no1
Geertz started to interpret facts through interpretation mainly through the use of semiotics

It's this bit I don't understand. What does it mean?

Originally posted by dottewell
It's this bit I don't understand. What does it mean?

Semiotics is the use of of interpretation through symbols, unlike Claude Levi-Strauss who looked for human universals through symbols such as the 'totem', Geertz looked for the meaning behind a symbol for a cultures ( as a seperate entity form other cultures) 'meaning' in the way they perceive 'life'.

He took ethnographic data and rather than repeating it by rote he tried to interpret the meaning behind it.....an analogy would be reading a poem and examinig its metaphoric meaning.

As I said check the net there's plently of info on Clifford Geertz .