ABSTRACT
Take as an example of the way in which linguistic concepts or premises entered the field of culture the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, under whose benign aegis “cultural studies” arose in North America over a generation ago. Geertz was famously influenced by the New Critics, and tried to apply their practice of close reading to the practices that he encountered in the field, which he described as a “rich ensemble of texts.” “Doing ethnogra-- phy,” he said, “is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript” (4-5). But beneath the general model of formalist literary criti-- cism lay a more profound if less explicit debt to Saussure that determined his basic understanding of culture itself. “The concept of culture I espouse,” Geertz said, “is essentially a semiotic one” (9). The reliance of the most promi-- nent anthropologists on semiotics ensured that Saussure would be taken, by anthropologists and others, as the central linguist, and that structuralism and semiotics would be understood as the most vital principles of linguistic sci-- ence, long after the discipline of linguistics itself had moved on.
