The essays collectively argue for a new approach to anthropology, one that emphasizes the interpretive analysis of culture, which Geertz describes as “webs of significance” spun by humans themselves.

He proposes that religion provides a framework for understanding what is “really real” to its adherents, serving to order the world in ways that make life’s ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes manageable.

In this view, religious symbols function to synthesize a society’s ethos (the moral and aesthetic aspects of life) with their worldview (the existential order).

Similarly, Geertz views ideology as a cultural system that provides individuals with symbolic frameworks for interpreting their social and political environments.

Geertz's work helped to move anthropology away from the search for universal laws of human behavior and towards a more nuanced understanding of how cultural meanings are constructed and maintained within specific contexts.

Geertz’s ideas also laid the groundwork for what would later be known as symbolic or interpretive anthropology, a school of thought that has had a lasting impact on the study of culture.