The Interpretation of Cultures

Geertz formulates a general theory about the “way in which a people perceive themselves and others, the way in which they experience time, and the affective tone of their collective life” (361) through a specific analysis of Balinese culture.

Human thought is social in its functions and applications. Because symbols are “material vehicles of thought” (362), the study of culture reveals a great deal about human thought—generally about how individuals orient themselves to the world and specifically about individuals’ characterization of other individuals. However, available theoretical frameworks—structural analysis and personality theory—are limited in their analysis. Geertz is interested in a “describing and analyzing the meaningful structure of experience (here, the experience of persons) as it is apprehended by representative members of a particular society at a particular point in time—in a word, a scientific phenomenology of culture” (364). He undertakes a systematic analysis of observable modes of thought in Balinese symbolic structures of personhood, time, and social conduct.

For background on personhood, Geertz offers Alfred Schutz’s categories of fellow persons as consociates, contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. Consociates share space, time, and daily encounter with those who perceive them; contemporaries share time, but not necessarily space. Neither predecessors nor successors share space and time, but predecessors can be known while successors cannot. Against this conceptual background, Geertz discusses six “symbolic orders of person-definition” (368) in Bali that demonstrate how a Balinese individual perceives fellow people: personal names, birth order names, kinship terms, teknonym, status titles, and public titles.

According to Geertz, personal names are the least important: They are rarely used as they are considered intensely private and indicate no familial or kinship connections. Their disuse also indicates the extent to which the concrete characteristics of consociates are not of social significance in Balinese culture. 

The four birth order names—Wayan, Njoman, Made/Nengan, and Ktut—refer to children and young adults who have not had children. The concrete characteristics of the individual are insignificant; instead, the recurring pattern of birth order names, which are used for different children or childless adults—expresses the “endless four-stage replication of an imperishable form” (371).

Similarly, kinship terms, a generational typology, indicate reciprocity between predecessor and successor. The third generation removed—either into the future or the past—is called the same kinship term, indicating the “immobilization of time through the iteration of form” (374). Kinship terms are rarely used in public discourse and do not indicate distinguishing characteristics: “the Balinese system of kinship terminology defines individuals in a primarily taxonomic, not a face-to-face, idiom […] It functions almost entirely as a cultural map upon which [only] certain persons can be located” (373).

Teknonym are the primary way that Balinese people refer to each other. Like birth order names and kinship terms, teknonym indicate the importance of producing offspring to Balinese culture, featuring terms such as “father-/mother-of,” “grandfather-/grandmother-of,” and “great-grandfather-/great-grandmother-of” (376). Geertz explains three ways that teknonym affect the perception of the self and the acquaintances. First, “the link between husband and wife is expressed in terms of their common relation to their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren” (376), and this is of social, economic, and spiritual significance. Second, teknonym indicate the procreational stratification of Balinese society: People are classified as being childless, parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents, which means the stages of human life are conceived of in terms of social regenesis. Third, indicating to whom one is ancestor, as opposed to whom one is a descendant, emphasizes reproductive continuity. 

Status titles, like personal names, are connected to the individual. However, unlike personal names, the status title that one is born into “does not signal his wealth, his power, or even his moral reputation, it signals his spiritual composition” (381), making status titles “images of the underlying relationship between the form of human society and the divine pattern” (382). Status titles are further organized through the Varna System, which organizes social life through cosmology rather than individual qualities:

the diversity of human talent and the workings of historical process are regarded as superficial phenomena when compared with the location of persons in a system of standardized status categories, as blind to individual character as they are immortal (384).

Individual characteristics and linear temporal order are de-emphasized, so as to express a normative image of how society should be ordered according to one’s proximity to the gods. 

Religion plays a significant role in public titles as well. Sometimes used in conjunction with other person-definition names that become secondary to the public title, public titles absorb individuals into their roles as stewards of the public. Public titles are closely connected with status titles and the Varna System, as they determine what public roles individuals are eligible for, indicating that the social order reflects the metaphysical order. The anonymity of public service is, thus, a reflection of the fact that gods are defined by what they govern, as opposed to their characteristics and motivations. Here, temporal order becomes an enduring present—a changeless endurance of specific forms. 

Balinese depersonalized conceptions of personhood have a significant impact on their sense of time. Depersonalization subsumes everyone outside of oneself into contemporaries, so the categories of consociate, predecessor, and successor, categories that would orient oneself to a linear conception of time, become null.

Geertz’ demonstrates this “detemporalization” through an analysis of Balinese calendars. The complex system of the permutational calendar, consisting of ten different simultaneous cycles of varying lengths of day-names, indicates the extent to which punctuality, not duration, matters to the Balinese: What matters is not “what time it is, but rather what kind of time it is” (393). For example, there are “good” and “bad” days on which to perform secular activities and participate in temple celebrations, and a person’s “birthday” determines temperament and talents. The lunar-solar calendar, while distinguished from the permutational calendar, also indicates the same sense of punctuality in its use: Its division into 12 months of 30 lunar days and 29 or 30 solar days “is more a supplement to the permutational than an alternative to it” (398) in that it acknowledges, at least minimally, the periodic variation of natural conditions, while assigning qualitative significance to the time. 

Accompanying depersonalization and detemporalization is “the ceremonialization of social intercourse” (399), characterized by a high degree of formality and etiquette, distinguished by two features—“shame” and the “absence of climax” (401). Where English conceptions of “shame” and its attendant notion of “guilt” have to do with private and public affective results of transgressions, the Balinese concept of shame, or lek, can more accurately be described as fear “that the public performance that is etiquette will be botched, that the social distance etiquette maintains will consequently collapse, and that the personality of the individual will then break through to dissolve his standardized public identity” (402). This persistent fear, then, governs social behavior by maintaining the deindividualization of personhood. 

On the other hand, the “absence of climax” in social activities maintains the ever-present quality of Balinese time because there is no intended destination or denouement to imply futurity: “Balinese social life lacks climax because it takes place in a motionless present, a vectorless now. Or, equally true, Balinese time lacks motion because Balinese social life lacks climax” (404). The Balinese orient themselves in the social world  through detemporalization. 

Geertz notes that dominant conceptions of cultural integration, cultural conflict, and cultural change in anthropology rely too heavily on the notion that harmony, instability, and incongruity are properties of meaning that behave in expected ways. He argues that integration, conflict, and change are not so simplistic; understanding them requires attention to the thought of those participating in a society ordered by symbolic structures. Since human thought is public, cultural integration is not “all-embracing, completely pervasive, [or] unbounded” (406)—instability and incongruity are just as telling about the way culture works as integration. Thus, culture should be understood less as an octopus: The movement of one limb produces movement in other limbs that together direct change. The octopus analogy updates Geertz’s conceptual development of culture as a web in Chapter 1. 

The Interpretation of Cultures has been largely an analysis of the changes taking place in newly independent states as cultural traditions come up against the establishment of nationhood. Geertz returns to the subject with respect to Bali and theoretical formulation of the link between personhood, time, and social behavior. He notes that certain factors in newly independent Bali, such as Sukarno’s individualized public persona, “the politics of continuing crisis” (410), “a passion for pushing events toward their climaxes” (410), and the “new informality of urban life and of the pan-Indonesian culture” (410) suggest changes in conceptions of personhood, time, and social behavior that challenge the dominant, traditional modes of cultural expression. Still, the value of Geertz’ formulation lies not in its ability to predict the direction of Balinese society, but rather in its development of “cultural concepts as active forces, of thought as a public phenomenon with effects like other public phenomena” (410-11).