An example of an analogy drawing upon a scientific concept,
"Symbol systems, man-created, shared, conventional, ordered, and indeed learned, provide human beings with a meaningful framework for orienting themselves to one another, to the world around them, and to themselves. At once a product and a determinant of social interactions, they are to the process of social life as a computer's program is to its operations, the genic helix to the development of the organism, the blueprint to the contraction of the bridge, the score to performance of the symphony, or, to choose a humbler analogy, the recipe to the baking of the cake – so the symbol system is the information source that, to some measurable extent, gives shape, direction, particularity, and point to an ongoing flow of activity.
Yet these analogies, which suggest a pre-existing template stamping onto a process external to it , pass rather facilely over what has emerged as the central theoretical problem for this more sophisticated approach; namely, how to conceptualise the dialectic between the cystallisation of such directive 'patterns of meaning' and the concrete course of social life.
There is a sense in which a computer's program is an outcome of prior developments in the technology of computing, a particular helix of phylogenetic history, a blueprint of earlier experiments in bridge building, a score of the evolution of musical performance, and a recipe of a long series of successful and unsuccessful cakes. But the simple fact that the information elements in these cases are materially separable from the processual – one can , in principle anyhow, write out the program, isolate the helix, draw the blueprint, publish the score, note down the recipe – makes them less useful as models for the interaction of cultural patterns and social processes where, a few more intellectualised realms like music and cake-baking in part aside, the very question at issue is precisely how such a separation is, even in thought, actually to be effected."
Clifford Geertz (2000) After the revolution: The fate of nationalism in the new states (first published 1971), in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (2nd Edition). New York. Basic Books.
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