Abstract

Nowadays, cultural anthropology is constantly growing as a profound and very large theoretical domain, thus becoming the inspirational source of many different trends of thought, spreading on the social sciences and philosophy. I should say  it  also tends to replace philosophy in its own traditional role of integrating data, ideas and information coming from all the scientific spectrum, and that is because of the growing complexity of the phenomenon: philosophy needs a sort of linking discipline for that, and anthropology is the most appropriate by itself. It also seems to represent the turning point in intercultural communication theories, given the development of a new branch – symbolic anthropology, known also as interpretive anthropology. My paper aims to analyse the change initially brought by this branch in the perception of cultural diversity, and even in alterity as the central concept in anthropology. As this change is visible and clearly postulated by its founder, the anthropologist and philosopher Clifford Geertz, my analysis would refer mainly to his works.