Geertz Clifford - The Interpretation of Cultures

C LIFFORD G EERTZ BELONGED to that rare species known as matres penser. Like a tiny number of other mastersFoucault, Habermas, Bourdieuhe inspired general readers and ordinary scholars operating at lower frequencies throughout the human sciences. Among historians, he left his mark on the generation that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s and who had had their fill of statistical models, functionalist explanations, structures and conjunctures, and dialectical materialism. Fired by Geertzs notions of symbolism and cultural systems, they attempted to do ethnography in the archives.

Yet Geertz never tried to found a school. If he could have been anyone in the 20th century, he once told me, he would have chosen James Joyce. Indeed, Geertzs literary flare got in the way of systematizing. The long, baroque sentences with their parentheses, piled-up adjectives, and convoluted syntax defied imitation. Despite his deep-dyed Weberianism and the years spent under Talcott Parsons, Geertz had no interest in combining propositions into a systematic structure. He cobbled together arguments from different, disparate sources. He was a bricoleur.

Not that he lacked rigor when it came to confronting theoretical issues. His harshest comment after sitting out a disappointing paper at the Institute for Advanced Study was usually underconceptualized. 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.

This approach lent itself to what emerged in France during the 1960s as the history of mentalities. It appealed to anyone who felt inspired by the work of Robert Mandrou, Georges Duby, Philippe Aries, and Michel Vovelle. It also provided something that they lacked: a concept of symbolism grounded in semiotics and an understanding of culture as a system of meaning. The old seminars on the history of mentalities in the Ecole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales have now been replaced by seminars on history and anthropology.

Geertz did more than anyone to promote the mutual reinforcement of history and anthropology, but he did not initiate it. It developed over many years from the convergence of elective affinities, as he might have put itthat is, a growing awareness of mutual interest in common problems. Anthropologists like Bernard Cohn and historians like Keith Thomas had crossed over the boundaries of their disciplines long before the publication of The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), the book by Geertz that had the most influence on historical writing. True, Geertz had demonstrated the possibilities of ethnographic history much earlier in The Social History of an Indonesian Town (1965), but that book probably was the least read of all his works. Although a great deal of historical reflection went into Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968), it was primarily an essay in the comparative sociology of religion inspired by the example of Max Weber. And Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980), the most historical of his books, aroused the most skepticism among historians. What then was Geertzs peculiar contribution to anthropological history and historical anthropology?

Most historians probably would reply, thick description. The concept fits Geertzs way of working, but it has been badly misunderstood. When historians try to apply it in their own work, they sometimes choose a subject that seems suitably anthropologicalrites of passage, witchcraft, religious rituals, charivarisand then pile on the descriptive details. As an ethnographer, 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 viewfuzzy at first, but increasingly clear as the interpretations led round and round a hermeneutic circle.

His genius, I believe, consisted in grasping at a thread in such a way as to unravel an entire pattern of culture. How he did it remains a mystery. He spotted peculiarities that made sense to the natives but remained opaque to anyone outside the systemthe 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.

This disposition did not merely lead him into remote villages in Indonesia and Morocco. It played on everything that came within his field of perception, including jazz, sports, politics, literature, and, yes, history. But how can historians make use of it? None of us is built like Clifford Geertz. If one follows the work of the historians most inspired by himJoan Scott, William Sewell, Natalie Davis, Keith Baker, Peter Burke, Rhys Isaac, myselfthere is no Geertzian stamp to be discovered, for there was no such thing as Geertzianism. His work opened up avenues for others to pursue, but the pursuit led 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 disciplesone of a kind.

Robert Darnton, Anthropology, History, and Clifford Geertz, Historically Speaking 8, no. 4 (2007): 3334. 2007 The Historical Society. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.