Symbolic Meaning

Examples of Symbolic Meaning in the following topics:

• The Symbolic Nature of Culture

  • Although language is perhaps the most obvious system of symbols we use to communicate, many things we do carry symbolic meaning.
  • Think, for example, of the way you dress and what it means to other people.
  • In certain urban environments, the symbolic meaning of people's clothes can signal gang affiliation.
  • The belief that culture is symbolically coded and can, therefore, be taught from one person to another, means that cultures, although bounded, can change.
  • Cultures are shared systems of symbols and meanings.

• The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

  • Symbolic interactionists view the family as a site of social reproduction where meanings are negotiated and maintained by family members.
  • Symbolic interactionism is a social theory that focuses on the analysis of patterns of communication, interpretation, and adjustment between individuals in relation to the meanings of symbols.
  • This emphasis on symbols, negotiated meaning, and the construction of society as an aspect of symbolic interactionism focuses attention on the roles that people play in society.
  • Symbolic interactionists also explore the changing meanings attached to family.
  • Symbolic interactionists explore the changing meanings attached to family.

• Religious Symbols

  • The Star of David is a Jewish religious symbol that represents Judaism.
  • Religious symbolism is the use by a religion of symbols including archetypes, acts, artwork, events, or natural phenomena.
  • The symbolism of the early Church was characterized as being understood by initiates only.
  • Religious symbolism is effective when it appeals to both the intellect and the emotions.
  • Discuss the use of religious symbols as means of representing the ideals and values of a particular religion

• Symbols and Nature

  • Language is a symbolic system of communication based on a complex system of rules relating spoken, signed, or written symbols.
  • A sign is a symbol that stands for something else.
  • Language is traditionally thought to consist of three parts: signs, meanings, and a code connecting signs with their meanings.
  • Language is based on complex rules relating spoken, signed, or written symbols to their meanings.
  • Written languages use visual symbols to represent the sounds of the spoken languages, but they still require syntactic rules that govern the production of meaning from sequences of words.

• The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

  • Symbolic interactionism looks at individual and group meaning-making, focusing on human action instead of large-scale social structures.
  • Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that things have for them
  • According to symbolic interactionism, the objective world has no reality for humans; only subjectively defined objects have meaning.
  • Meanings are not entities that are bestowed on humans and learned by habituation; instead, meanings can be altered through the creative capabilities of humans, and individuals may influence the many meanings that form their society.
  • Because they see meaning as the fundamental component of the interaction of human and society, studying human and social interaction requires an understanding of that meaning.

• Symbolic Interactionism

  • According to symbolic interactionism, the objective world has no reality for humans, only subjectively-defined objects have meaning.
  • Meanings are not entities that are bestowed on humans and learned by habituation.
  • Instead, meanings can be altered through the creative capabilities of humans, and individuals may influence the many meanings that form their society.
  • Because they see meaning as the fundamental component of human and society interaction, studying human and society interaction requires getting at that meaning.
  • Specifically, Symbolic Interaction seeks to uncover the ways "meanings" are deployed within interactions and embedded within larger social structures to facilitate social cohesion (Structural Functionalism) and social change (Conflict Theories).

• Defining Boundaries

  • One important factor in how symbolic boundaries function is how widely they are accepted as valid.
  • Symbolic boundaries are a "necessary but insufficient" condition for social change.
  • He saw the symbolic boundary between the sacred and the profane as the most profound of all social facts, and the one from which lesser symbolic boundaries were derived.
  • Rituals, whether secular or religious, were for Durkheim the means by which groups maintained their symbolic and moral boundaries.
  • Mary Douglas has subsequently emphasized the role of symbolic boundaries in organizing experience, private and public, even in a secular society.

• The Interactionist Perspective

  • According to theorists working in the symbolic interactionist perspective, health and illness are socially constructed.
  • According to theorists working in the symbolic interactionist perspective, health and illness are socially constructed.
  • Symbolic interactionist researchers investigate how people create meaning during social interaction, how they present and construct the self (or "identity"), and how they define situations of co-presence with others.
  • Symbolic interactionists believe that objects have meaning only through people's interactions with them in the environment, that the meanings people have for things develops through social interaction and that those meanings are handled and modified by a constant and ongoing interpretive process by individuals.
  • In essence, interactionists focus on the specific meanings and causes people attribute to illness.

• The Interactionist Perspective

  • From a symbolic interactionist perspective, gender is produced and reinforced through daily interactions and the use of symbols.
  • Interactionists believe that these meanings are derived through social interaction, and that these meanings are managed and transformed through an interpretive process that people use to make sense of, and handle, the objects that constitute their social worlds.
  • Symbolic interactionism aims to understand human behavior by analyzing the critical role of symbols in human interaction.
  • The meanings attached to symbols are socially created and fluid, instead of natural and static.
  • Because of this, we act and react to symbols based on their current assigned meanings.

• The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

  • The symbolic interactionist perspective posits that age is socially constructed and determined by symbols resembling social interactions.
  • According to the Symbolic Interactionist Perspective, old age, and aging, are socially constructed and determined by symbols that resemble aging in social interactions.
  • While aging itself is a biological process, the Symbolic Interactionist Perspective posits that the meaning behind being "young" or "old" is socially constructed.
  • This means that there is no inherent cultural meaning attached to the biological process of aging.
  • Rather, cultures imbue youth and age with particular meanings.