Geertz saw sacred symbols as central to all political life.

Evidence

Among anthropologists, Clifford Geertz is famous for having identified the centrality of sacred symbols springing from religious impulses to all forms of political life, nationalist as well as prenationalist, in societies both modern and premodern. The symbolic activities that take place in the center, Geertz suggests, give it “its aura of being not merely important but in some odd fashion connected with the way the world is built.” This is why “The gravity of high politics and the solemnity of high worship” are akin. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 916

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the observation that national centers are sites where power grounds itself in cosmology, echoing the reader’s trees-as-infrastructure and state-ritual interests.