Culture as text: hazards and possibilities of Geertz's literary/literacy metaphor

Abstract

This paper considers the conceptual, ethnographic, ethical, and methodological implications of Geertz's influential metaphors of culture as ‘text’ and of fieldwork as ‘reading.’ In Morocco, one of Geertz's two long-term field sites, large segments of the rural population, Berber-speaking even more than Arabic-speaking, are unschooled and nonliterate. Women's rich expressive culture, including religious culture, is oral. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among Tashelhit-speaking Berber women in southwestern Morocco, I consider the language ideologies that shape women's attitudes toward the production and dissemination of religious oral texts. These ideologies complicate the supposed transparency of Geertz's literary/literacy metaphor. The paper reconsiders the possibilities of this metaphor for the anthropology of language, and locates Geertz's contribution and critical responses to it within the history of ideas and ethics shaping ethnographic research.