“It is when neither a society’s most general cultural orientations nor its most down-to-earth, “pragmatic” ones suffice any longer to provide an adequate image of political process that ideologies begin to become crucial as sources of sociopolitical meanings and attitudes. In one sense, this statement is but another way of saying that ideology is a response to strain. But now we are including cultural as well as social and psychological strain. It is a loss of orientation that most directly gives rise to ideological activity, an inability, for lack of usable models, to comprehend the universe of civic rights and responsibilities in which one finds oneself located. (…)
And it is, in turn, the attempt of ideologies to render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them, that accounts both for the ideologies’ highly figurative nature and for the intensity with which, once accepted, they are held.”
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books Classics) (pp. 237-238). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
Writer Between Worlds
Soulful writing about humans and places
Writer Between Worlds 