ABSTRACT
A culture is that subset of possible or available meanings, which by virtue of enculturation, informal or formal, implicit or explicit, unintended or intended, has so given shape to the psychological processes of individuals in a society that those meanings have become, for those individuals, indistinguishable from experience itself. Decision-making allows actors to develop and clarify their preferences by interpreting accomplished action and evaluating its results. In this sense, decision-making is a special type of action, symbolic. Social and cultural norms institute roles, prescribing what is appropriate for actors in various situations and thus defining what each of them must do and what may legitimately be expected from others in different contexts. Cultural structure controls events only partially because, as Sahlins notes, events keep their internal force, which hinders any attempt to capture them fully inside a predefined system of meanings. Symbolic order is a grid, or rather a set of interpretative grids, that is indispensable but not exhaustive.
