Clifford Geertz found culture in the details

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid=20061108.E02&irec=1

November 08, 2006

Jesse Hession Grayman, Banda Aceh

Last week the social sciences lost one of its greatest scholars and Indonesianists. At the age of 80, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, passed away due to complications following heart surgery. Scholars of Indonesia in particular can not escape the long shadow of Geertz's persuasive theory and elegant ethnography, for it was his years of fieldwork in the towns of Java, Bali, and other parts of the archipelago that informed his social analysis.
Beginning in the early 1950s in the Central Javanese town of Pare (called Modjokuto in his writings), Geertz was part of a pioneering group of social scientists concerned with social and economic development in societies emerging from colonialism.

Though his writings in the 1960s are based on careful and sensitive attention to culture, language, and history, works such as The Religion of Java (1960), Cultural Involution (1963), Peddlers and Princes (1963), and The Social History of an Indonesian Town (1965) among others reflect the concerns of a young western scholar preoccupied with the modern forces of nationalism, political organization, and bureaucratization at work in Indonesia that were transforming Javanese society. Although his conclusions are hardly prescriptive, there was an implicit goal in these writings, and that was a search for what makes a post-colonial society advance toward prosperity.

His data from Java along with subsequent fieldwork in Bali and other islands (also Morocco) always focuses on local particularities: A village election in Java, a cockfight in Bali, a theft dispute in Moroccan highlands. Overarching theories of society and development, it turns out, are constantly upset by the details. Even before his famous essay on interpretive anthropology, Thick Description, was published in 1973, Geertz was writing about how an understanding of cultural paradigms is necessary to document the way people from different parts of the world negotiate changes in society. By "cultural paradigm," Geertz meant how a group of people in a particular time and place use symbols in their everyday lives to make meaning in terms that make sense to them.

Geertz eventually elevated these symbols to the metaphor of the text, describing culture as an ensemble of texts that people use "to say something about something" to one another. The anthropologist's job is to peer over her informants' shoulders and, not unlike literary critics, to interpret these cultural texts for others.
Geertz's enduring definition of culture is the following oft-quoted sentence from Thick Description: "Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."

Geertz's definition of culture has been the basis for a meaning-centered anthropology for decades and has influenced social scientists from other disciplines long after anthropologists themselves took a more critical position on the culture concept.

On the one hand, the Geertzian notion of "culture" -- that our lives are embedded within coherent webs of shared meaning -- has a seductive humanist allure and is a useful tool for teaching cultural relativism. But a more ambivalent approach to the culture concept recognizes that any one anthropologist's representation of Javanese Culture, for example, can never be a neutral pursuit, and that the quest for coherent webs necessarily leaves out the possibility for contested or even incommensurable meanings from within.
Geertz's explicit commitment to Weberian analysis, as noted by Professor Aditjondro in The Jakarta Post's obituary for Geertz last Friday, may lead to culturalist assumptions that obscure relevant structural, political, and economic critiques of a society.

As the source of Geertz's data that culminated in his theory of culture, there is no better place than Indonesia to engage with these debates. One could argue, for example, that The Religion of Java's codification of aliran (the well-known abangan, santri, and priyayi distinction) imposes a tidy coherence upon Javanese society that, both before and after Geertz, has proven very useful to powerful regimes.

The Indonesian state, elaborating extensively upon examples set by the Dutch, has invested heavily in the symbols of both national and regional "cultures," ensuring that the habits, fashions, cuisine, languages, and arts of diverse peoples across the archipelago are codified into discrete and recognizable entities.
These investments pay off handsomely in tourist dollars but also help obscure other less savory state interventions. John Pemberton, in his ethnography On the Subject of Java, documents this process in Central Java. While Geertz argues for the interpretion of culture in order to make sense of local histories, Pemberton reverses this assumption and instead shows how history has produced a "culture effect" upon the people of Java.

European concepts imported by Dutch scholars such as "ritual," "culture" and "tradition" are deployed so effectively that Javanese royals, Indonesian bureaucrats, and Javanese villagers all internalize and reproduce them eagerly to an extent that everyday practice on Java assumes a customary reality. And yet, first time visitors and long term observers of Indonesia can not escape the obvious sense that something "cultural" is going on in everyday life. Geertz's analysis of 19th century Bali's "theater state" in his ethnography Negara (1981), for example, is indispensable for an understanding of modern Indonesian political culture. It should be noted that Geertz never argued that his interpretive theory of culture should wholly account for society, but instead refines our debate about it.

For his part, Geertz observed with good humor as he watched and learned from successive Marxian and post-structuralist critiques that deconstructed his work, such as Aditjondro's and Pemberton's respectively, but he still held to his theoretical commitments. When asked in a 1991 interview if he considered himself involved in the same project as post-structuralist scholars, Geertz responded: "I don't see myself as a post-structuralist ... I'm a late modernist under pressure."

The writer is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
He can be reached at jgrayman@post.harvard.edu.