The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)

by Clifford Geertz

Weberianism

But he did not invent many concepts of his own. He borrowed them from linguistic philosophy, semiotics, Weberian sociology, and any other field likely to be helpful for the task at hand. Then he set to work, using the tools most suited for prying open a foreign way of thinking and exploring an alien mental world.

also provided something that they lacked: a concept of symbolism grounded in semiotics and an understanding of culture as a system of meaning.

Geertz certainly believed in empirical rigor, but as a theorist, he insisted on the importance of systems of meaning. In his view, descriptions thickened when the ethnographer seized on the multiple meanings transmitted through a symbol and followed their interplay with other symbols until a cultural system emerged in view—fuzzy at first, but increasingly clear as the interpretations led round and round a hermeneutic circle.

He spotted peculiarities that made sense to the “natives” but remained opaque to anyone outside the system—the use of power to stage ceremonies in Bali, for example, as opposed to the use of ceremony to reinforce power. He had an uncanny ability to imagine himself in other persons’ skins and to follow their train of thought at points where it ran against the grain of his own culture.

set off in many directions himself, scattering his ideas across a vast landscape, just as he gathered them from many different sources. He was a master without disciples—one of a kind.

I feel this about him

This backward order of things—first you write and then you figure out what you are writing about—may seem odd or even perverse, but it is, I think, at least most of the time, standard procedure in cultural anthropology. Some pretenders to high science and higher technique aside, we do not start out with well-formed ideas we carry off to distant places to check out by means of carefully codified procedures systematically applied.

The writing this produces is accordingly exploratory, self-questioning, and shaped more by the occasions of its production than its post-hoc organization into chaptered books and thematic monographs might suggest.

Further, correcting one’s misjudgments by writing changed views back into earlier works seems to me not wholly cricket, and it obscures the development of ideas that one is supposedly trying to demonstrate in collecting the essays in the first place.

They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. The sudden vogue of such a grande idée, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she says, “to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives.”

The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.

morass into

(1) “the total way of life of a people”; (2) “the social legacy the individual acquires from his group”; (3) “a way of thinking, feeling, and believing”; (4) “an abstraction from behavior”; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behaves; (6) a “store house of pooled learning”; (7) “a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems”; (8) “learned behavior”; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) “a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men”; (11) “a precipitate of history”; and turning, perhaps in desperation, to similes, as a map, as a sieve, and as a matrix.

Eclecticism is self-defeating not because there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but because there are so many: it is necessary to choose.

The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing,

But this pronouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication.

if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it;

you should look at what the practitioners of it do.

The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way: (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company.

“thick description” of what he is doing (“practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion”) lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a cultural category

which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households… writing his

Beethoven quartet as an, admittedly rather special but, for these purposes, nicely illustrative, sample of culture, no one would, I think, identify it with its score, with the skills and knowledge needed to play it, with the understanding of it possessed by its performers or auditors, nor, to take care, en passant, of the reductionists and reifiers, with a particular performance of it or with some mysterious entity transcending material existence. The “no one” is perhaps too strong here, for there are always incorrigibles.

assent.

If ethnography is thick description and ethnographers those who are doing the describing, then the determining question for any given example of it, whether a field journal squib or a Malinowski-sized monograph, is whether it sorts winks from twitches and real winks from mimicked ones. It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.

into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.

rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? “Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.” Such, indeed, is the condition of things.