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Cultural theory, except for those who buy into it as though it were religious dogma, has the disadvantage of seeming either hopelessly counterintuitive or too obvious to be worth stating in the first place.
The dogmatically committed theorists are merely annoying; it has been essential, for example, for a generation to cite Jacques Lacan as though there had never been decades of exacting and groundbreaking research that would confirm or disconfirm the master’s intuitions. (And, of course, once it is translated into English rather than into poststructuralese, much of what the master says makes perfect sense.)
But I am happier with those who contend with their master without losing respect for him, the case in point being Clifford Geertz, whose obituary appears in today’s New York Times. Here is an anthropologist who began from his own masters’ hypotheses and shifted his terms to fit the change of decades, as well as to incorporate his own new insights.
Geertz’s theory seems painfully beyond obvious: much of culture is not particularly either functional or dysfunctional, except insofar as it provides structures of meaning within which all the humdrum activities of daily survival take on a sense of being worthwhile. This would be unnecessary to state, were it not for generations of functionalists determined to reduce the most arcane activities to adjuncts to pure survival.
I should be pulling quotes from Geertz to summarize his work, but I prefer to explore my immediate recollection of the meaning of his long career, and let others tell me I’ve got it totally wrong.
I did go as far just now as re-reading Geertz’s famous “Deep Play” essay on the Balinese cockfight, which left me wondering once more how it is that economists still struggle with why their econometric models don’t work. Anyone who assumes that the economy is the sum total of a set of decisions made by individuals out to maximize their material return through a purely rational assessment of self-interest…well, such a person hasn’t read a word of a century’s worth of anthropology. Yet some economists are horrified by the possibility that economic decisions are skewed by emotional variables.
But I digress. Much as I would like to take that line of thought in directions relevant to the American mid-term elections, I return to my official topic:
Over four decades, Geertz revisited his chosen communities in Bali and elsewhere, reflecting increasingly on the problem of representing the communities’ changes to an analytical academic public in terms that the communities themselves would not have chosen. Much discussion has ensued over whether these terms are ones that, once explained rightly, the communities were likely to find appropriate. (At least that is my recollection, which is, mind you, hopelessly polluted by intervening discussions of other anthropologists.)
To insist upon the uninterpretability of cultures except in their own terms is to assert that cultures are intrinsically incomprehensible except when one joins them; to insist upon the complete accuracy of our outsiders’ interpretations is to insist upon our intrinsic superiority as analysts. Neither assertion is the case, of course. This is a dead-end dichotomy because the terms of relative power, of insider versus outsider knowledge of a phenomenon, shift almost from moment to moment in the dialogue or the dialectic. There is no perfect outsider comprehension of a situation, but there is no perfect insider comprehension of a situation, either.
I, too, have wanted to find ways of getting dead-end discussions pulled into different realms of being; to suggest alternate methods of putting the question that will break open old dualities of “functional” versus “symbolic,” “sacred” versus “profane,” et cetera. So often the alternative methodologies are presented as a choice between “either-or” versus “both-and” modes of understanding some aspect of the universe, whereas in truth the problem is better stated as “neither here nor there.” James Clifford has carried on this aspect of the investigation with varying degrees of success, sometimes spilling over from anthropology into openly acknowledged short-story writing in the same book.
The dogmatically committed theorists are merely annoying; it has been essential, for example, for a generation to cite Jacques Lacan as though there had never been decades of exacting and groundbreaking research that would confirm or disconfirm the master’s intuitions. (And, of course, once it is translated into English rather than into poststructuralese, much of what the master says makes perfect sense.)
But I am happier with those who contend with their master without losing respect for him, the case in point being Clifford Geertz, whose obituary appears in today’s New York Times. Here is an anthropologist who began from his own masters’ hypotheses and shifted his terms to fit the change of decades, as well as to incorporate his own new insights.
Geertz’s theory seems painfully beyond obvious: much of culture is not particularly either functional or dysfunctional, except insofar as it provides structures of meaning within which all the humdrum activities of daily survival take on a sense of being worthwhile. This would be unnecessary to state, were it not for generations of functionalists determined to reduce the most arcane activities to adjuncts to pure survival.
I should be pulling quotes from Geertz to summarize his work, but I prefer to explore my immediate recollection of the meaning of his long career, and let others tell me I’ve got it totally wrong.
I did go as far just now as re-reading Geertz’s famous “Deep Play” essay on the Balinese cockfight, which left me wondering once more how it is that economists still struggle with why their econometric models don’t work. Anyone who assumes that the economy is the sum total of a set of decisions made by individuals out to maximize their material return through a purely rational assessment of self-interest…well, such a person hasn’t read a word of a century’s worth of anthropology. Yet some economists are horrified by the possibility that economic decisions are skewed by emotional variables.
But I digress. Much as I would like to take that line of thought in directions relevant to the American mid-term elections, I return to my official topic:
Over four decades, Geertz revisited his chosen communities in Bali and elsewhere, reflecting increasingly on the problem of representing the communities’ changes to an analytical academic public in terms that the communities themselves would not have chosen. Much discussion has ensued over whether these terms are ones that, once explained rightly, the communities were likely to find appropriate. (At least that is my recollection, which is, mind you, hopelessly polluted by intervening discussions of other anthropologists.)
To insist upon the uninterpretability of cultures except in their own terms is to assert that cultures are intrinsically incomprehensible except when one joins them; to insist upon the complete accuracy of our outsiders’ interpretations is to insist upon our intrinsic superiority as analysts. Neither assertion is the case, of course. This is a dead-end dichotomy because the terms of relative power, of insider versus outsider knowledge of a phenomenon, shift almost from moment to moment in the dialogue or the dialectic. There is no perfect outsider comprehension of a situation, but there is no perfect insider comprehension of a situation, either.
I, too, have wanted to find ways of getting dead-end discussions pulled into different realms of being; to suggest alternate methods of putting the question that will break open old dualities of “functional” versus “symbolic,” “sacred” versus “profane,” et cetera. So often the alternative methodologies are presented as a choice between “either-or” versus “both-and” modes of understanding some aspect of the universe, whereas in truth the problem is better stated as “neither here nor there.” James Clifford has carried on this aspect of the investigation with varying degrees of success, sometimes spilling over from anthropology into openly acknowledged short-story writing in the same book.
