Geertz among the Historians

Abstract

34 Historically Speaking March/April 2007 in different directions. He 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. Robert Darnton is the Shelby Cullom Davis '30 Professor of European History at Princeton University. He is the author of several books and articles on the Enlightenment, including The Forbidden BestSellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (Norton, 1995). Geertz among the Historians Peter Burke At first sight, the influence that Clifford Geertz's ideas have had on historians, including such leading figures as Robert Darnton and Rhys Isaac, is something of a puzzle. By contrast, the reasons for his influence on his fellow anthropologists are reasonably clear. His reaction against positivist, evolutionary, functionalist, and scientific anthropologies came unusually early and was unusually powerful. He was, as far as I know, the first anthropologist to align himself with the hermeneutic tradition, in particular with the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, at a time when his colleagues were either structuralists, following the model of Claude Lévi-Strauss, or structural-functionalists, as in the case of the Anglo-American tradition . Geertz saw anthropology as one of the humanities, and so an appropriate topic of essays for the general reader in a literary tradition that runs from Montaigne to Emerson and beyond : the tradition of discussing what it means to be human. I find it more difficult to explain—or should I say interpret—the considerable influence that Geertz has exercised over the last thirty years or so on academic historians, or at least on a substantial and articulate minority of that large and heterogeneous profession. Since traditional historical methods have been closer to hermeneutics than they ever were to structuralism or functionalism, Geertz appears to have been telling us—with unusual eloquence and wit, it is true—what we already knew. Perhaps the best way to be influential is precisely to mix familiar with unfamiliar ideas in almost equal doses, adding the spice of novelty to recommendations already perceived to be sound. To go any deeper in the search for explanations requires imitating Geertz himself and making use of a micro-example. Although many history students have been required to read "Thick Description ," and the idea of a "theater state" has provoked considerable debate among historians of Europe as well as of Asia, Geertz's most-cited essay remains "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight ." It is not difficult to understand why. The author gives a vivid description of a dramatic occasion that he himself compares with a performance of King Lear. In addition, he promises readers that the cockfight will offer an "immediate, insideview grasp" of Balinese mentality. It is a "dramatization of status concerns" in which cocks are a Ifind it more difficult to explain—or should I say interpret—the considerable influence that Geertz has exercised over the last thirty years or so on academic historians, or at least on a substantial and articulate minority of that large and heterogeneous profession. metaphor for men; "a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves ." The micro-example leads the author and the reader on to a series of generalizations, culminating in the suggestion that a culture is a kind of text that may be read not only by insiders but by outsiders—anthropologists or historians—as well. Thirty-five years later it has become quite easy to criticize Geertz's general statements. We tell our students to look for the differences between texts and cultures as well as the similarities; to ask whether all Balinese, women and men, tell the same story; and to consider the difficulty of moving from vivid scenes like the cockfight to an account of cultural change. All the same, this essay helped many cultural historians, myself included, to understand rituals and the dramatic aspect of other events. It also encouraged us to look for the relation between these events and the culture surrounding them. If "Deep Play" did not lead to a series of studies of the English cockfight, the Spanish bullfight, and so on, this...