Sociocultural anthropology lost a major figure with the
death, in late October, of Clifford Geertz. Geertz was a key founder of the subfield of sociocultural anthropology
known as “symbolic anthropology,” which had its heyday in the 1960s and 70s
(and whose lingering influence is felt in a number of corners of anthropology
to this day). Bill Ford asked me to
write a little something for the ELS Blog to mark this occasion.
When I entered graduate school in the 1970s, there was a
vigorous struggle underway between symbolic anthropologists of various stripes,
and scholars from competing paradigms such as economic and cognitive
anthropology. (Cognitivists were then
excitedly engaged in the cross-cultural study of cognitive structures such as schemas,
etc. It seems as if the entire field of
anthropology is periodically reduced, in the public media, to single figures
and approaches – but in fact it has always had just as many internal divisions
and debates as any other self-respecting social science. And recall also that “sociocultural
anthropology” is just one of the four main fields into which U.S. anthropology has always been divided: the other three being archeology, physical anthropology, and
anthropological linguistics.) Although
sociocultural anthropologists persist in maintaining a number of distinct
schools of thought, there has been a welcome rapprochement between some of
those whose work emphasized the importance of economic factors, on the one
hand, and the symbolic approach associated with Geertz. Clearly, a number of us would now argue, both
people’s material needs and their ideas are important in understanding human
societies, and the more interesting questions revolve around how, when, where,
and to what degree different aspects of social and cultural systems make a
difference in people’s lives.
As with many pioneers in social research, when we go back to
read Geertz’s work we find a far less one-dimensional thinker than might be
indicated by the label of “symbolic” or “interpretive” anthropology. Certainly Geertz pressed the discipline to
think in more depth about cultural analysis and the role of symbols in
organizing human experience. At various
points in his career, he described this form of analysis in different ways. But a passage from his famous book, The Interpretation of Cultures, indicates
Geertz’s own interest in moving to an integrative model:
“Nothing will discredit a semiotic approach to culture more
quickly than allowing it to drift into a combination of intuitionism and
alchemy, no matter how elegantly the intuitions are expressed or modern the
alchemy is made to look. The danger that
cultural analysis … will lose touch with the hard surfaces of life – with the
political, economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere
contained – and with the biological and physical necessities on which those
surfaces rest, is an ever-present one. The only defense against it, and against, thus, turning cultural
analysis into a kind of sociological aestheticism, is to train this analysis on
such realities and such necessities in the first place. … To look at the
symbolic dimensions of social action – art, religion, ideology, science, law,
morality, common sense – is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of
human life for some empyrean realm of de-emotionalized forms; it is to plunge
into the midst of them.” (p. 30)
Thus Geertz’s longterm research in Indonesia and Morocco,
which began in the 1950s and 1960s, focused not only on symbols, but also on
economics; not only on the symbolic importance of cock fights in Balinese culture
-- but also on how industrialization created a “dualism” in the Indonesian
economy. One of Geertz’s early works is
devoted to an examination of the ways that politics, culture, and economic
changes had interacted with ecology through a number of historical periods to
create dilemmas for development in Indonesia (see Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The
Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia).
Geertz is perhaps best-known in law for his essay “Local
Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative
Perspective,” originally given as the Storrs Lectures for 1981 at the Yale Law
School. Here he argues that law and anthropology
share a focus on “local knowledge” – on the “artisan task of seeing broad
principles in parochial facts.” Yet the
two fields as often mistranslate as understand one another, because of their
vastly different approaches to this task and to the “facts” themselves. Geertz argues that using comparative anthropological
analysis of legal systems across cultures can offer the field of law an
important insight: that one may have to exit one’s own categories and
epistemological assumptions to translate accurately across diverse conceptions
of law, of local reality, or of how society should be run. He argues that disciplines such as
anthropology and history
“may have more to offer us in making our way through such
perplexities as the shape-shifting nature of the fact/law distinction across
cultural traditions and historical phases than supposedly more ‘scientific’
enterprises, where everything that arises must converge. If there is any message …, it is that the
world is a various place, various between lawyers and anthropologists, various
between Muslims and Hindus, … and much is to be gained, scientifically and
otherwise, by confronting that grand actuality rather than wishing it away in a
haze of forceless generalities and false comforts.” (p. 234).
Here we can detect echoes of the analysis of incommensurability (and
U.S. law’s failures in coping with it) offered by present-day sociologists like
Wendy Espeland.
In sum, my quick re-immersion in Geertz’s opus in order to
respond to Bill’s request left me with the feeling I have when I go back to
read founding thinkers like Max Weber, or Ruth Benedict – that the richness of
their response to the empirical realities with which they dealt far exceeded
the labels placed on their work. Geertz
shared the commitment of most anthropologists to indepth lengthy fieldwork,
performed with an adequate knowledge of indigenous languages. He pushed the field to examine its standards
for ethnography – i.e., for our written reports of field research. In his early volume Islam Observed, Geertz undertook to test the validity of insights
generated by “intensive indepth fieldwork [performed] in particular settings”
in broader national arenas: “Like all
scientific propositions, anthropological interpretations must be tested against
the material they are designed to interpret” (p. vii). He might not have chosen to use this
terminology in his later work, which showed more suspicion of the dangers of
“scientism” in social science generally. (All methods are partial, all understandings somewhat contingent – and
the language of science can be used to induce false certainty [which in fact
leads to a very unscientific inflation of the significance of often
quite limited findings].) But taken
across the span of his lifetime, Geertz’s work gives us a gift to which we can
return time and again for deeper understandings of law, society, culture, and
the disciplines devoted to studying them.
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