Visual Culture by Howells and Negreiros Chapter 6: Hermeneutics

During nineteenth century, the concept of culture as a way of life of an entire people emerged with the new discipline of anthropology. You can make a list of what constitutes a culture (TS Eliot did so on 1948 "to understand the culture is to understand the people" - clue to why visual culture is so important: it helps us understand ourselves. (an interesting example is the 2010 Yves St Laurent Opium perfume advert adorning billboards using a naked Sophie Dahl in a very suggestive pose. Apparently about 730 people complained to ASA. This was deemed to be a record number of complaints. But turn this on its head: out of a population of 60m, ONLY 730 complained about an advert that is actually soft porn).

Clifford Geertz was an anthropologist who was interested in culture - 'an assemblage of texts' he called it. Cultural meaning was not discoverable in experimentally but needs interpretation. The theory of interpretation is known as hermeneutics.

One of Geertz's most famous essays id 'Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight'. Geertz and his wife watched a cockfight and concluded that a) the gambling was the most important part of the activity; b) that is is not the gambling per se that is important, more the pride - the recognition that comes with winning. (find this interesting as it has long fascinated me why financial luminaries such as Warren Buffet and Rupert Murdoch continue to seek to make more money even though they are fantastically wealthy - why not do something else? Is it perhaps the sense of competition, that they are in their element in their chosen field and that the financial gain is more the prize for recognizing their success than required for material purposes? Perhaps that is the key to financial gain - do it for the success not the result).

Criticism of Geertz came from Crapanzano who quarelled  with Geertz's  'stylistic virtuosity' (???) and that he sets himself above those he is studying - an outsider who imposes a meaning on someone else's culture then returns to Princeton.

The latter is a popular refrain - who is Geertz (or anyone else) to interpret understanding to others' customs? This is indeed a cultural issue itself as it is part of Western culture to understand the world around us. Virtually all of the significant scientific advancers are Western. We are inquisitive, enquiring, nosey, and interpretative. Other cultures are more accepting, arguably more at peace with their customs, less questioning. Neither is better than the other, just different.

It is an admirable aim to try to understand one another but should be done with a sense of humility - we can never know it all.

The chapter goes on to point out the similarities between many of the approaches we have looked at. There are cross overs in the methodologies and conclusions applied- Panofsky's iconography and semiotics; Panofsky's intrinsic meaning and Barthes' 'goes without saying'; Fry tackled the issue of class interest and painting 60 years before Berger; Berger and Barthes were scornful of bourgeios values.

The idea that several approaches  suggests visual texts may have more than one meaning'