ABSTRACT
The sociologist Hugh Duncan observed that what distinguishes an institution's use of symbols from individual usage is the vastly greater capacity of institutions to label experience and to name reality. The ritual nature of symbolic interactions, including the role of social institutions, should alert one again to how symbols shape and maintain reality. "Every symbol", the political analyst Murray Edelman says, "stands for something other than itself, and it also evokes an attitude, a set of impressions, or a pattern of events associated through time, through space, through logic, or through imagination with the symbol". He believes, essentially two types of political symbols, referential symbols and condensation symbols. Although Roland Barthes' model comes close to showing the constancy of the human factor in the diffusion and internalization of significant symbols. Barthes proposed the model of control groups to show that the hierarchical arrangement of ideas attached to particular modes of cultural activity is neither arbitrary nor accidental.
