Geertz's Gifts

Renato Rosaldo

Common Knowledge, Volume 13, Issue 2-3, Spring-Fall 2007, pp. 206-210
(Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/220011

Access provided by Goldsmith's College, University Of London (9 Mar 2019 15:25 GMT)
COLUMNS

GEERTZ’S GIFTS

Renato Rosaldo

As I write, it is three months since Cliff’s death. I miss him terribly. The evening
he and my son, Sam, then six, talked joyously about baseball cards as they went
through them one by one. The evening I spoke of my deep bereavement and he
listened with sensitivity, insight, and an open heart. The afternoon I ranted about
those people who voted for Bush against their own interests. Cliff was gruff as he
responded: “You liberals are all alike, you think human beings are rational.” (He,
as we both knew, described himself as a social-democratic liberal.) All that any of
us who knew him has now are his writings, but at least they have the same quali-
ties as the man himself: insight, humor, and irony.
A major American thinker, besides being the most widely read anthropolo-
gist of the latter part of the twentieth century, Clifford Geertz shaped and articu-
lated a vision of cultural anthropology that drew on and had an impact on the
human sciences and humanities from political science and sociology, through
psychology and social history, to philosophy and literary studies. His frequent
writings in the New York Review of Books created an audience for him beyond the
academic, including artists and so-called general readers. Signs of his impact
appeared in both predictable and unexpected places. There is, for instance, a San
Francisco experimental theater ensemble that aspires to engage and reflect its
racially and culturally diverse audiences. Thick House is the name of its venue;
and the ensemble calls itself Thick Description, after the title of Geertz’s classic

Common Knowledge 13:2-3

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2007-002
© 2007 by Duke University Press

206
essay on interpretive method. And then, there is that global bank that advertises

207
about the importance of “local knowledge” — the title of a classic collection of
Geertz essays. His fifteen honorary doctorates (other than the one from Cam-

Ro s a l d o • G e e r t z ’s Gi f t s
bridge University), were bestowed by American institutions, but his principal
works are available to readers of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German,
Swedish, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Estonian, Hun-
garian, Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and of course Indonesian
and Arabic.
He emerged in 1956 from graduate school a follower of Max Weber. The
Religion of Java, the publication title of Geertz’s revised dissertation (1960), made
the book appear to be a sequel to Weber’s series Ancient Judaism, The Religion of
China, and The Religion of India. Geertz later drew on Weber to define his own
central project: the study of creatures (human beings) “suspended in webs of
meaning they themselves have spun.”1 A number of his early essays were Webe-
rian in spirit and infused with a tinge of Talcott Parsons. Early titles begin var-
iously with the words Religion, Ideology, Art, Common Sense, and end with the
phrase As a Cultural System. His Weberian inspiration was also evident in his
comparative ethnographic studies on modernization in Indonesia, Peddlers and
Princes and Agricultural Involution (both 1963), as well as in Islam Observed (1968),
his work on Islam in Indonesia and Morocco.
A challenge that Geertz set for himself in his essays and in his ethnogra-
phies was to move from the obviously cultural (Art, Religion, religions in Java)
to the difficult cases — perspectives or forms of life usually not seen as cultural:
Common Sense, Polity, Economy. There was also the state as theater in nine-
teenth-century Bali (Negara, 1980) and the bazaar in Morocco (Meaning and Order
in Moroccan Society, 1979, written with Hildred Geertz and Lawrence Rosen).
Geertz’s penchant for the problematic led him to philosophical questions, which
(despite his commitment to particulars and diffidence about generalities) he con-
fessed to in the subtitle of his last essay collection, Available Light: Anthropological
Reflections on Philosophical Topics (2000). All the same, his more speculative and
general remarks were intended for the improvement of human science method-
ology, which for him meant a method less prone to speculation and generaliza-
tion. One implication of his ironic title After the Fact (1995) is that even the most
brute of brute facts is culturally shaped and historically produced. The really real
turns out to be made; and after Geertz had finished describing any reality and its
process of construction, it seemed hardly what it had been before. His interpre-
tive burden was to make mayhem, bargaining in the bazaar, and bloody violence

1.  Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflec-

tions on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 17.
 vividly present in all their bruteness at the same time that he showed how even
20 8

such matters were culturally mediated.

His ethnographic writings about Java, Bali, and Morocco are substantial
C ommon K no w l e dg e

and significant, but Geertz’s signature work is the essay collection The Interpreta-
tion of Cultures (1973), which consists of writings about (and writings about writ-
ing) ethnography. It is as if he aimed to follow in Weber’s footsteps but happened
to find his voice less in the long book, heavy with footnotes, than in the essay
form. His essays were short excursions, often marked by artful tacking between
larger certainties he would have us avoid. He would have us tilt, for example,
neither toward idealism nor toward reductionism; instead he would encourage us
to dance through the spaces in between, as his own writings do. They embody
grace and beauty, and read like gifts to the reader. The movement of his essays
never ceases, shifting from one vantage point to another, now with irony, now
laughter, now trenchant critique, now a clear stand, turning issues over and over,
inspecting them from diverse angles, making their complexity not simple but
intelligible.
His essays are not meant to be subjected to literal reading. Earnest read-
ers, inclined to flatten curvilinear texts, will most probably not have noticed that
Geertz is really funny. When he notes, to pick an example more or less at ran-
dom, that cultural differences on our planet are growing less extreme, less clearly
marked than they once were (“the good old days of widow burning and canni-
balism are gone forever”), he adds that, nonetheless, significant differences will
remain. “The French will never eat salted butter,” he explains.2 The subtitle of
After the Fact is a double entendre, Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropolo-
gist, two for one, such a bargain. When he depicts himself about to embark on a
college career at the age of twenty, he says, “I wanted to be a novelist, preferably
famous.”3
As a comic stylist, Geertz might be called the Jane Austen of ethnography.
Consider the biting ironies of the following passage from Austen’s Mansfield Park.
She is writing about the essential unknowability of the timing in changes of the
human heart: “I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one
may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions,
and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in dif-
ferent people.”4 I am reminded of a passage from Geertz on the vicissitudes of
timing in personal life in relation to the timing of geopolitical events. Cliff and
his wife, both desperately ill but determined to begin their study of spiritual-
ity in Indonesia without delay, arrive in Padang, a coastal town on the island of
Sumatra: “The day after our arrival,” Geertz writes, “a regionalist rebellion that

2.  Geertz, Available Light, 68. 4.  Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. June Sturrock (1814;
Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2001), 465.
3.  Geertz, Available Light, 4.
has been brewing for a year or so but that everybody assumes, as they assume

20 9
of everything that looks inevitable, will never actually happen (‘They will work
something out; they always do’) finally breaks out. Worse, Padang is the rebel

Ro s a l d o • G e e r t z ’s Gi f t s
headquarters. The rebel government is installed in our hotel.”5 He had me laugh-
ing out loud at the excruciating facts, his step-by-step revelation that the rebellion
not only breaks out, but breaks out in the town where they are staying; and not
only in that town, but the rebels are headquartered in the Geertz’s home away
from home.
The argument of his essays was often organized around comparisons based
on difference. He sought to bring two, sometimes three different entities — cul-
tures, towns, countries, historical periods, modernities, individual thinkers,
disciplines — into mutually illuminating contrast. He famously compared, for
example, the Balinese cockfight (seen as a form of art) with major canonical works
of Western culture, Macbeth, King Lear, and Crime and Punishment. In an essay
as compelling as it was unsettling for both cultural anthropologists and liter-
ary scholars, he identified, in the cockfight as in the canonical works, themes
of “death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance.”6 The themes of
the cockfight and of the literary works were similar but differently expressed
in accord with divergent social conventions, cultural assumptions, and generic
requirements.
Geertz at times conceived of his comparisons — comparisons based on
difference — in terms of a dialogue. Typically, he meant dialogue both figura-
tively and literally, and he slid easily from one meaning into the other. After
writing, for example, of the need to create “conversations” across social bound-
aries — boundaries such as those of “ethnicity, religion, class, gender, language,
race” — he addressed the necessity “to enlarge the possibility of intelligible dis-
course between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook,
wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where tumbled as they are into
endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way.”7
Dialogue or intelligible discourse, whether fashioned in writing by an ethnogra-
pher or conducted orally between individuals with marked differences, is a matter
of listening as well as of speaking. Geertz was a serious listener, for whom listen-
ing involved being open to the unnerving possibility of being convinced by one’s
interlocutor and changing one’s own mind.
Which brings me to the central issue of the symposium that Common
Knowledge, in this installment, is dedicating to the memory of Clifford Geertz.

5.  Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades,
One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995), 71.
6.  Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic
Books, 1973), 443.
7.  Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 147.
 There is much material there about what relativism is and is not, and on why
210

this seems to so many such a problem. My own question, as befits the subject, is
more specific: was Geertz a relativist? In answering, a fine distinction needs to
C ommon K no w l e dg e

be made. I would say that he was a cultural, but not an ethical, relativist, though
he would never have put his complex view of the matter so flatly. The notion
of cultural relativism that he did hold is the fairly modest doctrine that, simply
because a culture is different from one’s own, or because some foreigner differs
from oneself, it does not follow that they are demented, dangerous, stupid, or
pathological. They could simply be different, living with distinctive assumptions
that may be rendered intelligible in their own context. His most explicit essay on
cultural relativism has, characteristically, an ironic title: “Anti-Anti-Relativism.”
He meant that he was against thinkers who categorically reject relativism. In the
first place, their notion of relativism is almost always wildly mistaken. He did not
want to get caught in the position of having to defend ideas that he never held in
the first place, ideas that in fact he disagreed with. Why do battle with somebody
else’s straw man?
Moreover, Geertz held that cultural relativism does not either imply or lead
to ethical relativism, that alleged slippery slope where anything goes and, before
you know it, they’ll be doing it in the street. Quite the contrary. When different
peoples, however defined, bump up against one another, they tend, he thought,
to maintain not only their cultural, but also their ethical, assumptions. Engag-
ing with other cultural worlds does not mean losing one’s own ethical bearings.
Lacking such engagement, any individual’s imagination is as limited as that of his
or her culture. It is only by rendering intelligible the actual variations, histori-
cal and cultural, in human forms of life, each in its full singularity, that one can
expand, as Geertz did so astonishingly, the awareness of human beings of the
range and character of human possibility.