The Interpretation of Cultures

“Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behavior—or, more precisely, social action—that cultural forms find articulation.”

Geertz alludes to the conceptual revision of the mind and other articulations of the function of culture that will come in later chapters. The idea that cultural forms find articulation in the flow of behavior suggests that the mind and body are not separate and that the intermingled processes of human thought and cultural organization are central to human behavior.

“Undirected by culture patterns—organized systems of significant symbols—man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless. Culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just an ornament of human existence but—the principal basis of its specificity—an essential condition for it”

Geertz conceives culture to be not merely tangential, but rather integral to humanity. Without cultural patterns as an organizing framework, there would be neither meaning nor shape to human behavior or emotion. It is culture that distinguishes humans from lower animals.

“If we want to discover what man amounts to, we can only find it in what men are: and what men are, above all other things, is various. It is in understanding that variousness—its range, its nature, its basis, and its implications—that we shall come to construct a concept of human nature that, more than a statistical shadow and less than a primitivist dream, has both substance and truth.”

Geertz emphasizes that the specificity of cultural patterns in human societies is where the unity of humankind is found. The unity of humankind does not lie in shallow similarities, as previous strands of thought have suggested, but rather in the particularities, i.e., cultures, that link humans’ intrinsic capabilities and what they actually become.

“In sum, human intellection, in the specific sense of directive reasoning, depends upon the manipulation of certain kinds of cultural resources in such a manner as to produce (discover, select) environmental stimuli needed—for whatever purpose—by the organism; it is a search for information. And this search is the more pressing because of the high degree of generality of the information intrinsically available to the organism from genetic sources.”

The cognitive side of human thought is reliant upon cultural symbols to determine what behaviors to perform and how. Again, Geertz suggests that culture is the bridge between intrinsic capability and specific performance.

“Religious symbols formulate a basic congruence between a particular style of life and a specific (if, most often, implicit) metaphysic, and in so doing sustain each with the borrowed authority of the other.”

Geertz implies that religious belief and practice formulates and sustains the attunement between cosmic order and human experience. It is a circular relationship in which the one flows into the other continuously, suggesting a spiritual-material reciprocity that is ordered by sacred symbols.

“For an anthropologist, the importance of religion lies in its capacity to serve, for an individual or for a group, as a source of general, yet distinctive, conceptions of the world, the self, and the relations between them, on the one hand—its model of aspect—and of rooted, no less distinctive "mental" dispositions—its model for aspect—on the other. From these cultural functions flow, in turn, its social and psychological ones.”

Herein lies the fundamental conception of religion as a culture system that Geertz continues to support through concrete analyses. As both model of and model for, religion fuses worldview and ethos into a continuous flow. When anthropologists study religion with attention to this continuous flow, the social and psychological implications of religion become clearer.

“Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action; social structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing network of social relations. Culture and social structure are then but different abstractions from the same phenomena.”

A fundamental, albeit often neglected, analytic distinction in social science study is that culture system and social system are independent, yet mutually interdependent, structures. By distinguishing between the two, Geertz finds it possible to better understand social conflict, not as an indication of a diminishing culture system, but rather as a symptom of a culture system being pressed by unusual circumstances.

“The driving forces in social change can be clearly formulated only by a more dynamic form of functionalist theory, one which takes into account the fact that man's need to live in a world to which he can attribute some significance, whose essential import he feels he can grasp, often diverges from his concurrent need to maintain a functioning social organism.”

Geertz emphasizes the need to distinguish between culture system and social system so that social change and social conflict can be better understood. Because culture and social systems differ in integration characteristics, they are often in an incongruent and tense relationship.

“Not only do many so-called primitive religions show the results of significant amounts of self-conscious criticism, but a popular religiosity of a traditional sort persists with great strength in societies where religious thought has attained its highest reaches of philosophical sophistication”

Geertz acknowledges that while his ensuing analysis of Balinese religion relies on Weber’s polarized traditional and rationalized religion, he does not believe that the polar distinction is as factual or as linear as Weber has conceived it. Geertz argues through empirical analysis that the transition from traditional to rationalized religion is a dynamic process that demonstrates the ability of traditional religions to adapt to the modern world.

“No more than scientific studies of religion ought to begin with unnecessary questions about the legitimacy of the substantive claims of their subject matter ought scientific studies of ideology to begin with such questions”

Geertz argues that evaluative conceptions of ideology have no place in social science study. His non-evaluative reconceptualization of ideology as a culture system allows it to become a viable analytic concept, and gives the social scientist room to analyze its contents and meaning.

“Generalized, the "who are we" question asks what cultural forms—what systems of meaningful symbols—to employ to give value and significance to the activities of the state, and by extension to the civil life of its citizens.”

Geertz says that the creation of a national identity involves the determination of what cultural forms give meaning to the national polity in relation to its citizens. This is significant in new state politics because defining national polity is marked by competing ideas of what the characteristics and essentials of that polity are. For Geertz, the competition is integral to the process of articulating a national identity, so cultural conflict at once drives and undermines the creation of national unity.

“Ideological change is not an independent stream of thought running alongside social process and reflecting (or determining) it, it is a dimension of that process itself.”

The distinction between culture system and social system is important; for Geertz, the distinction cannot stop at presenting one system as a mere reflection of the other. They must be understood as independent and mutually interdependent, making cultural change a necessary part of the process of social change and vice versa.

“The insistence on recognition as someone who is visible and matters and the will to be modern and dynamic thus tend to diverge, and much of the political process in the new states pivots around an heroic effort to keep them aligned.”

Geertz suggests that traditional cultural conflict plays a key role in the modernizing process, or integrative revolution. The national polity must become a container in which traditional conflicts can be mediated and neutralized—that is, the creation of an effective nation-state doesn’t eliminate traditional conflict, but rather modernizes it.

“The network of primordial alliance and opposition is a dense, intricate, but yet precisely articulated one, the product, in most cases, of centuries of gradual crystallization. The unfamiliar civil state, born yesterday from the meager remains of an exhausted colonial regime, is superimposed upon this fine-spun and lovingly conserved texture of pride and suspicion, and must somehow contrive to weave it into the fabric of modern politics.”

The modern nation-state political structure is unfamiliar and doesn’t easily align with the political structure(s) organized by traditional cultural systems. Therefore, the creation and stabilization of the national polity must involve methods of integrating traditional culture—or, modernizing traditional culture.

“The integrative revolution does not do away with ethnocentrism; it merely modernizes it.”

Geertz succinctly states why traditional cultural conflict plays a key role in the process of new states becoming modern national polities, alluding to his suggestion that the national polity becomes a container for the mediation and neutralization of that traditional conflict.

“The heterogeneity of Indonesian culture and that of modern political thought thus played into one another to produce an ideological situation in which a highly generalized consensus at one level—that the country must collectively storm the heights of modernity while clinging, also collectively, to the essentials of its heritage—was countered on another by an accelerating dissensus as to what direction the heights should be stormed from and what the essentials were.”

Geertz describes how the attachment of various traditionalisms to various modernisms—the fusion of essentialism and epochalism—resulted in a diversity of ideological perspectives in Indonesia’s new state situation. This passage also suggests that national polity must recognize the heterogeneity of both traditional and modern thought for stability to develop.

“Cultural interpretations of politics are powerful to the degree that they can survive, in an intellectual sense, the events of politics; and their ability to do that depends on the degree to which they are well grounded sociologically, not on their inner coherence, their rhetorical plausibility, or their aesthetic appeal. When they are properly anchored, whatever happens reinforces them; when they are not, whatever happens explodes them.”

A non-evaluative conception of ideology as a culture system allows social scientists to gain insight into the meaning and function of ideological systems. Sociological grounding means considering ideological patterns by judging their content, but rather in terms of how those ideological patterns are embedded in the concrete realities of citizens’ lives and social interactions.

“It is coming at last to dawn upon even the most isolationist-minded of such scholars that theirs is not only a special science, but a special science which cannot even function without a great deal of help from other special sciences previously despised. Here, anyway, the notion that we are all members of one another has made a certain measure of progress.”

Geertz acknowledges the increasing acceptance of multidisciplinary study in social science. However, he notes that anthropology is still undervalued, as it typically considered to be mere data collection and incapable of generating theory. Geertz aims to demonstrate that anthropology can play a more central and valuable role in multidisciplinary study, specifically because the interpretive approach leads to theory construction that offers insight into other social science fields.

“That Levi-Strauss should have been able to transmute the romantic passion of Tristes Tropiques into the hypermodern intellectualism of La Pensée Sauvage is surely a startling achievement. But there remain the questions one cannot help but ask.”

Geertz illustrates that the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity in the social sciences, especially cultural anthropology, is more blurred than positivistic notions of scientific study hold. Although Levi-Strauss’s work (and the work of other social scientists) raises the question of objectivity, it does not acknowledge that subjective experience is inherent to the study of human societies, especially with the interpretive approach. That Geertz raises these questions demonstrates Weber’s influence on Geertz. Geertz’s consideration of inherent subjectivity will lead to methodology in which anthropologists are self-reflexive and explicit about how their social positions and identities influence their interpretations.

“Human thought is consummately social: social in its origins, social in its functions, social in its forms, social in its applications. At base, thinking is a public activity—its natural habitat is the houseyard, the marketplace, and the town square. The implications of this fact for the anthropological analysis of culture, my concern here, are enormous, subtle, and insufficiently appreciated.”

Geertz’s emphasis on the public nature of human thought is an enduring theme. Here, it undergirds his discussion of the relationship among Balinese conceptions of personhood, time, and social conduct. Through empirical analysis, Geertz constructs a theory that has implications for human society generally.

“The study of thought is, to borrow a phrase from Joseph Levenson, the study of men thinking; and as they think not in some special place of their own, but in the same place—the social world—that they do everything else, the nature of cultural integration, cultural change, or cultural conflict is to be probed for there: in the experiences of individuals and groups of individuals as, under the guidance of symbols, they perceive, feel, reason, judge, and act.”

Anthropological study, and specifically the interpretive approach to anthropological study, that is conducted with the conception that human thought is public in nature, allows for more adequate understanding of cultural integration, change, and conflict by wresting them from the logic of how they’re expected to behave. Cultural analysis is not only about the consistencies among symbolic elements, but also about incongruities that provide insight into how humans perceive and experience their social worlds.

“The close and immediate interdependency between conceptions of person, time, and conduct which has been proposed in this essay is, so I would argue, a general phenomenon, even if the particular Balinese form of it is peculiar to a degree, because such an interdependency is inherent in the way in which human experience is organized, a necessary effect of the conditions under which human life is led.”

From an empirical analysis of the concrete realities of Balinese culture symbols, Geertz derives a general theory that is applicable to all human societies. The discussion in Chapter 14 is an example of how the particularity of cultural analysis enables broader generalizations to be drawn even as they stay close to the ground.

“It is in such a way, coloring experience with the light they cast it in, rather than through whatever material effects they may have, that the arts play their role, as arts, in social life.”

Geertz’s explains the mutually reinforcing creation and maintenance of human sensibility through art. Geertz’s conception of Balinese cockfighting as an art form demonstrates how this mutual reinforcement happens: Art doesn’t merely display subjectivity; it also regenerates it.