active center of social order

is a point in a society where its leading ideas come together with its leading institutions to create an arena in which the events that most vitally affect its members' lives take place.

points in a society at which 'its leading ideas come together with its leading institutions to create an arena in which the events that most vitally affect its members' lives take place. ' . . . ' (Geertz, Centers, Kinds, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power', in his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic 1983: 22-3) a 'A culture center, for Geertz, is inherently sacred and serves to develop, maintain, and broadcast that world-order that comes to its lofiest, most undefiled and unimpeachable expression within its borders' (in . . .'a point within a culture where leading ideas come together with leading institutions and where a governing elite uses the set of symbolic forms involved to express the fact that it is in truth governing'. [Geertz]

active center of social order, n.All

active center of social order