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The Interpretation of Cultures
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Themes
Deriving Generality from Particularity
A theme that emerges quite clearly in Geertz’s approach to the study of culture is the idea that anthropology’s contribution to the social sciences lies in its power to construct general theory out of the particularities of a given society’s culture. In Chapter 1, Geertz acknowledges that cultural interpretation seemingly makes theoretical development difficult because anthropological study inherently requires staying close to the ground. Unlike in other social sciences, theoretical development in anthropology does not consist of imaginative abstractions, but rather of the concrete realities of social life. However, this presumed difficulty does not preclude anthropologists from drawing theoretical conclusions. In fact, it is precisely the particularity of cultural interpretation that allows broader conclusions to be drawn about what culture is and how it functions. In anthropology, “The aim is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics” (28).
Geertz argues that the diversity of humankind, as expressed through cultural variance, allows generality to be drawn from specificity. For example, criticizing the search for a consensus gentium that undergirds Enlightenment Era thought and alternative anthropological views of the scientific concept of culture that developed in response, Geertz suggests that “it may be in the cultural particularities of people—in their oddities—that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found” (43). In Chapter 3, his conceptual revision of the mind from an anthropological standpoint suggests that culture’s variety across human societies is integral to the demonstration of humankind’s psychic unity. Of import in understanding human thought is not that humans can learn, but specifically what they must learn—cultural patterns that orient them to their specific social environments.
For example, in Chapter 5, Geertz theorizes that “a meaningful relation between the values a people holds and the general order of existence within which it finds itself is an essential element in all religions, however those values or that order be conceived” (127). He supports this theory of a relationship between ethos and worldview with a careful and specific examination of the Javanese wajang art form and religious ritual. In Chapter 6, his conceptual revision of functionalism that culminates in the theory that “dynamic elements of social change […] arise from the failure of cultural patterns to be perfectly congruent with the forms of social organization” (144)—analysis drawn from a specific instance of a catastrophic funeral rite in a Javanese village. In Chapter 8, Geertz uses the example of Indonesia’s political situation in 1964 to theorize that the rise of nationalist ideology is “produced by a transformation in political life” (220). Thus, ideology attempts to “render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them” through symbolic framing that maps “problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience” (220). In Chapter 10, he theorizes that the integrative revolution consists in the tension between “insistence on recognition as someone who is visible and matters and the will to be modern and dynamic” (259) that is at once the driving force and biggest obstacle in new state politics. He supports this theory through an examination of patterns of cultural conflict and how they play into national political conflict in eight different newly independent states. Although this last example appears to be generalizing across cases, his explanation of each country’s specific situations and patterns hold true to his advocacy of generalizing within cases. Furthermore, he notes, in a demonstration of logical consistency, a need for “a more circumstantial tracing” (309) to understand the continued development of the integrative revolution.
The Public Nature of Cognitive and Affective Domains
Heavily influenced by Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of the Mind (1949), Geertz emphasizes throughout The Interpretation of Cultures that the cognitive and affective domains of human thought are public, and not separate from the behaviors the body enacts. Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for this theme most explicitly. Through a discussion of the intermingled, rather than sequential, development of the distinctive features of human mentality and the acquisition of culture, Geertz asserts that cultural resources are constituent to human thought. Since culture is public, it follows that human thought is a public activity: “In fact, thinking as an overt, public act, involving the purposeful manipulation of objective materials, is probably fundamental to human beings” (76).
Geertz elaborates on the cognitive and affective aspects of thinking that are directed by culture. On the cognitive side,
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 (79).
That is, culture provides the necessary information about the environment to direct an individual’s behavior. On the affective side,
In this context our mental task shifts […] toward a determining of the affective significance, the emotional import of that pattern of events. We are concerned not with solving problems, but with clarifying feelings. Nevertheless, the existence of cultural resources, of an adequate system of public symbols, is just as essential to this sort of process as it is to that of directive reasoning (81).
Geertz suggests here that culture provides information to direct behavior. To clarify the public nature of and relationship between the two domains of thought, Geertz, turns to specific examples. In Chapter 4, the discussion of religion as a cultural system demonstrates the extent to which cosmic order and human experience are attuned to one another through the interplay of affective and cognitive thought. Geertz asserts that sacred symbols induce the distinct yet related dispositions of motivation and mood; the affective component that is motive denotes a “chronic inclination to perform certain sorts of acts and experience certain sorts of feelings” (96), those feelings being the moods that the religious devotee is susceptible to when stimulated by the sacred symbols.
Geertz explains the cognitive aspect by establishing the relationship between emotional and cognitive processing: “The dispositions which religious rituals induce thus have their most important impact […] outside the boundaries of the ritual itself as they reflect back to color the individual's conception of the established world of bare fact” (119). That is to say, the affective tone of religious belief and practice prompted in the public ritual space colors the secular landscape of the individual. The affective aspect takes on an air of rationality, suggesting that the cognitive domain of reasoning is also integral to, prompted by, and colors religious belief and practice, as well as behavior in secular life.
Geertz articulates a similar relationship between affect and cognition in Chapter 5’s discussion of ethos and worldview. For example, in Chapter 8, extrinsic theory implies that “thinking, conceptualization, formulation, comprehension, understanding, or what-have-you, consists not of ghostly happenings in the head, but of a matching of the states and processes of symbolic models against the states and processes of the wider world” (214). As the cognitive and affective aspects of ideology are both extrinsic sources of information that pattern human behavior, the stronghold of an ideological framework relies on its ability to stimulate emotional resonances that become completely rationalized through a presentation of the political order as fact. As a cultural pattern, ideology is public, providing necessary information to the individual about their environment to direct their public behavior, which simultaneously reinforces their belief.
The Distinction between Culture System and Social System
In The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz is adamant that distinguishing between culture system and social system makes for a more sophisticated and accurate analysis of what precisely is happening in a given society. The model undergirds Geertz’s analysis in several subsequent essays, but it is most evident in Chapter 6 when he discusses the botched Javanese funeral rite:
It is the thesis of this chapter that one of the major reasons for the inability of functional theory to cope with change lies in its failure to treat sociological and cultural processes on equal terms; almost inevitably one of the two either is ignored or is sacrificed (143).
As Geertz launches his conceptual revision of functional theory, he distinguishes analytically between culture system and social system, noting that they are independent yet mutually interdependent. A culture system denotes “an ordered system of meaning and of symbols, in terms of which social interaction takes place” (144), while a social system denotes “the pattern of social interaction itself” (144). He further emphasizes their distinction by pointing out their types of integration characteristics, noting that they are inherently incongruent and in tension with one another. Thus, the disruption of the funeral rite derives from “an incongruity between the cultural framework of meaning and the patterning of social interaction” (168).
Geertz also suggests a similar tension in terms of political ideology in Indonesia in Chapter 11. Where the Javanese example from Chapter 6 shows an incongruity between a cultural tradition that orders unity and a social system characterized by bifurcation, the Indonesian example works in the reverse. In Indonesia, the cultural heterogeneity of the people is in tension with the national polity’s attempt to organize a unified sociopolitical structure, producing a rivalry over the “the right to specify the terms under which direction of the state, or even mere official existence, is granted” (322). That is, as Geertz discusses more extensively in Chapter 10, older tradition-based cultural attachments of organization conflict with the modern model of state-based organization, not simply because of the state’s attempt to unify a heterogeneous body, but also because the factions within that heterogeneous body have varying ideas of what defines and constitutes the national body. It is only possible to draw out the tension and a possible path towards its neutralization when the culture organization and social organization are understood as distinct, interdependent entities. Thus, Geertz attributes Indonesia’s failure to create a viable national polity to its insistence on relying on nationalist ideologies that inadequately account for the varying terms in which the Indonesian people understand the structure of their society.
In Chapter 12, Geertz emphasizes the distinction again. Discussing the new state situation in Bali, Geertz asserts that sociological realism—“distinguishing the cultural ambitions of traditional states on the one hand and the social institutions in terms of which these cultural ambitions were, usually quite incompletely, realized on the other” (337-38)—makes it possible to understand the relationship between traditional and new state polities/politics, as well as the relationship between past and present. Thus, the distinction between culture and social system serves not only anthropological, psychological, and sociological study, but also historical study.
The distinction between culture system and social system plays an integral role in Geertz’s analyses. The distinction implies the contributions of anthropology to other social sciences, and suggests that the study of culture draws out the distinction, making more sophisticated analysis and conceptual development possible.
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