None of the options really fit my interpretation. But given small clues (signposts) found here and there in the text, I think not only is it a different culture, it's an entirely different epistemology operating in it's own moral universe where symbolic meaning and value are contested and are entirely made evident by small changes through time. I don't believe the addition of magic is a separate process or phenomenon that simply exists along side material and symbolic culture. It is intrinsically woven with it, changes over time (is mutable), and they affect each other to an extent that it's threads can no longer be teased out.
As Clifford Geertz said: "The concept of culture I espouse...is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."
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blamebrampton) wrote2011-02-08 11:58 pm
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As Clifford Geertz said:
"The concept of culture I espouse...is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."