On Clifford Geertz

Abstract

38 Historically Speaking March/April 2007 On Clifford Geertz Keith Windschuttle The cover notes on the recent Clifford Geertz collectionAvailable Lightsay that the book "treats the reader to an analysis of the American intellectual climate by someone who did much to shape it." This is all too true. During the past tiiirty years, Geertz has been at the height of academic audiority not only in his own discipline of anthropology, but also in history, the social sciences, and die study of literature. He was the founder of the methodology of "thick description" whose aim, he said, was "to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad interpretations about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics." His method was not only a major influence in cultural anthropology but also inspired the subdiscipline of cultural history. Among Australian historians alone, those he directly influenced include Inga Clendinnen on die Mayans and the Aztecs, Greg Dening on Polynesian culture, Rhys Isaac on colonial Virginia, and Donna Merwick on Dutch New York. Geertz pursued his objectives partly through his anthropological fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco in the 1950s and 1960s and pardy dirough his historical studies, such as his interpretation of the royal symbolism of Elizabeth I of England and of the Negara court in Bali. He wrote a long essay about a Balinese cockfight he witnessed in 1958. His aim was to persuade his readers that diis activity was not just a cheap, low-life blood sport on which foolish young men wagered far more money than they could afford . He called cockfighting an "art form" of monumental proportions, a Balinese equivalent of King Learor Crime andPunishment, which "catches up these themes—death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence , chance—and, ordering them into an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to dirow into relief a particular view of their essential nature." In another essay from the 1970s, Geertz reproduced a long, verbatim description by a 19th-century Danish observer of a suttee rite in Bali, in which die cremation of a dead Rajah was accompanied by die immolation of his diree young and beautiful concubines . In diis case, Geertz again claimed literary motives . He said his purpose in recounting what he called diis "celebration of the quieter beauties of personal obliteration," this "chaste hymn to annihilation ," was to emulate the literary critic Lionel Trilling when the latter tried to explain die similarly distant cultural mores of Georgian England in die novels of Jane Austen. In justifying this approach, Geertz claimed to be demonstrating how closely the work of the andiropologist resembled that of the literary critic. In particular , he wanted to show how cultural interpretation resembled a critic's reading of a poem. But it is also clear that his agenda was to persuade his readers to take a different attitude toward behavior to which most Westerners would normally react with disgust. By portraying cockfighting as a noble art and the burning of widows as a spectacle of awesome beauty, he was continuing the celebration of the exThe great deficiency ofGeert^ and his confreres was theirfailure to distinguish between Westernisation and modernisation. otic begun by his American anthropological precursors Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Margaret Mead. Geertz's target was the Western mentality, and his objective was to destabilize its assumption that its observations were natural and its concepts universal. This tactic has worked remarkably well. In the 19di century, Western imperial powers used customs like suttee as a rationale for imposing their own rule of law over states where it was practiced. By die late 20fh century, the anthropological profession was urgingits students to see ceremonies of this kind not as evidence of barbarism but as authentic expressions of particular cultures. The idea diat Westerners might intervene in the name of dieir own principles had itself become die real cultural offense. This kind of cultural relativism was intended to serve the interests of many of the subjects of anthropological investigation, especially the indigenous people, peasants, and die landless of die underdeveloped world. It hoped to change damaging attitudes toward diem in die West...