Clifford Geertz: Culture Custom and Ethics

There are several reasons why one should read anthropology. First, anthropology makes good literature. Ethnographical accounts have superseded the travelogues, the essays, and the descriptions of faraway places that have always gripped the minds of Western readers since the Renaissance. More than literature, anthropology is now catalogued as science. But as Fred Inglis notes in his intellectual biography of Clifford Geertz, "being good at anthropology is inseparable from writing it well." Second, anthropology is fun to read. It makes the familiar unfamiliar, and turns the unfamiliar into recognizable patterns of familiarity. True, structural analysis of kinship systems or patient decoding of mythologies may not be everybody's conception of a fun read. But even the stern lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss may elicit a smile as they describe "joking relationships" among cousins in West Africa, or the ubiquitous figure of the trickster in traditional folktales.Third, by reading anthropology, one can learn a few things about human nature. There is much talk about the capitalized Other in cultural studies departments or women's magazines, but when do we really talk to each other? Anthropology offers the freedom to permit unprecedented forms of inquiry into human conduct. Defined by Inglis as "the common pursuit of true judgment about human variety and peculiarity", it brings to light the "strange estrangements of other people", and takes the detour of relativism to formulate a more complete universalism. Fourth and last, there is something moral and ethical, perhaps a little bit crazy too, in a discipline that sends young scholars to live in a tent among illiterate people, not to teach them, but to learn from them. To take Collingwood's expression as quoted by Inglis, anthropology offers "ideals to live for and principles to live by". Its code of ethics is embodied in its methodology: "describing thickly and truthfully the real things which are there is the first, best duty of the human scientist and intellectual."If there are good reasons to read anthropology, there are special reasons for reading Clifford Geertz, and maybe for practicing anthropology the way he intended to. First, from whatever angle you approach it, style is of the essence. Science has a style, and the distinctiveness of a prose is one way of recognizing an author's authority. As Inglis notes, "something that goes wrong in the writing goes wrong in the thought." Geertz, raised as a farmboy and who entered college thanks to the G.I. Bill, studied literature and philosophy before turning to anthropology. His intellectual heroes were Faulkner and Hemingway, John Austin and Gilbert Ryle, and he learned how to write and how to think by studying the masters. As Inglis points out, "there are times when Geertz's own style has about it some of the tortured mannerism of Faulkner". It proceeds through metaphors and well-identified tropes: chiasmus, oxymoron, metonymy. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" is surely Geertz's most famous contribution to the literature of anthropology; but as Inglis rightly points out, it is also a striking addition to English literature, and may well belong to literary anthologies, along with several other essays.Second, Geertz's propensity to be very funny illuminates his writings and sharpens the sting in the controversies he conducted with other social scientists. I had never seen Geertz's picture, but I imagined him just as he figures on Inglis' book cover--greying, smiling, moustached. If "irony is a postmodernist's best friend", then Geertz inaugurates the postmodernist moment in the social sciences. But Inglis is right to draw a sharp line between Geertz and his dishevelled epigones. Many "po-mo" academics in the seventies and the eighties turned against Geertz and committed ritualistic murder of the symbolic father. But Clifford Geertz survived these attacks in good shape, and he ultimately had the last laugh. Compared to his lasting legacy, postmodernism "led to some awful prose and some narcissistic books", but soon spinned into confusion and decay. Inspired by "a philosophy of deliquescence", it withdrew into "the highminded theorization of ineffectuality". As a consequence, "anthropology fell off its wall and became drenched in its own yolk". Once the most popular of the humane sciences, it drew itself into an academic corner and, along with much literary criticism, film theory, and cultural studies, became an object of derision to the popular press and to positivist scientists who denounced it as an intellectual imposture.As a third point, we should not forget that Geertz was, first and foremost, a scientist. His contribution to the social sciences is decisive, on both empirical and theoretical counts. Geertz polished the comparative method and gave it a special ring: the chiasmus, or inverted parallelism. One finds this criss-cross structure of inversion both as a literary trope ("to locate in the tenor of their setting the sources of their spell") and as a methodological tool ("Spain lacked Holland's Calvinism, China Japan's feudality"). In Peddlers and Princes, Geertz applies the Weberian hypothesis of finding out a social group that would hold a modernist agenda of reformation and change. But the peddlers of Java cannot break out of narrow individualism into modern corporatism; and the descendents of the princes of Bali cannot quit conservatism for innovation. Best remembered for the expression "thick description" (which he borrowed from Gilbert Ryle), Geertz offered lasting examples of what such an undertaking should look like. The shadow play, the funeral rite, the cockfight, the bazaar, are all "constellations of embodied ideas" that still shine bright in the firmament of ethnographic writing; and one cannot approach a market town, a desert citadel, or a princely capital without having in mind Java's Modjokuto, Morocco's Sefrou, or Bali's Tabanan.On top of that, Geertz used whatever available light there was to enlighten and clear the way of our common future. Social sciences, least of all anthropology, are not supposed to offer predictions, and there are few ethnographers in the corridors of power. Clifford Geertz always maintained a healthy distance from the centres of decision, and did not consider anthropology an ancillary discipline. But he also took the pain to address non-academic audiences and to reach out beyond the confined circle of his discipline. His two most influential books, The Interpretation of Cultures and Local Knowledge, are collection of essays and lectures delivered in various circumstances, not theoretical treatises; and his last major work, After the Fact, is intended to offer lessons for us moderns. Geertz could inspire both postmodern literary critics and diplomatic officials sending dispatches from the field. He solicited neither use, nor did he discourage it.On many topics, Geertz was a precursor, and he anticipated many contemporary debates. Commenting Observing Islam, Inglis notes that "the future of Islam from thirty-odd years ago is now our present, and what has happened to it is pretty much what Geertz said would happen". Whereas others celebrated multiculturalism and the multiple uses of diversity, Geertz said flatly that "moral collisions are inevitable, and moral disagreement certain to be permanent and likely to be bloody". His description of Java's economic "involution" set the tone for all future discussions on Indonesia's economic prospects, and what he called "the ground bass of passionless horror" that surfaces in the cockfight made itself heard at every juncture of the archipelago's history. As Inglis notes, "so far as anybody knows, nobody ever drew this kind of picture for the improvement of American policy in Vietnam. It would have been better if they had."Finally, it all boils down to a question of ethics. All previous elements lead to it: writing well is a moral duty; humour and ironical distance a philosophical way of life; to grasp the scientific method is to grasp ethical principles as well; and "good manners make for good anthropology". Anthropological relativism is not to be conflated with ethical relativism or anything-goes nihilism. There is a stronger moral impulse in Geertz than he stands ready to admit. "To take lessons from Geertz, writes Inglis, is to borrow something of the manner from the man while learning to look at things his way." Geertz's method-become-biography provides a moral-intellectual example. And Inglis' intellectual portrait of Clifford Geertz, written in adoration of the master and in faithful imitation of his stylistic signature, provides a lasting monument for one of our key contemporary thinkers.