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Review: Geertz's Ambiguous Legacy Author(s): Ann Swidler Review by: Ann Swidler Source: Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 3 (May, 1996), pp. 299-302Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2077435Accessed: 20-05-2015 20:35 UTC

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CONTEMPORARYSOCIOLOGY 299

been sacrificed. We have lost sight of "The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century." Braverman's point of departure was the craftworker who obtains fulfillment through the creation of objects first con- ceived in the imagination. His point of conclusion was the vision of an alternative future, a socialism that would not restore the craftworker but would instead recombine conception and execution at the collective level to forge a classless society based on democratic planning. This double critique from the standpoint of a vanishing past and a utopian future easily disappears in a welter of scientific "explanation." Moreover, the eclipse of materialist critique opens the door to idealism-structure dissolved into a linguis- tic construction, and history reduced to narrative. Experience becomes discourse, oppression becomes talk about talk.

The domestication of critique and the interpretive turn coincide with the separa- tion of intellectuals from the working class. Labor and Monopoly Capital described the eclipse of the industrial craftworker, but it could as well have been about the eclipse of the intellectual craftworker who unites the academy with the working class, who resists the intense professionalization of the univer- sity, who refuses to package the lived experience of workers for scholastic consump- tion. Once an artisan, now an organic intellectual, Braverman strove to refute his own thesis, to be an exception to his own laws. And here lies Braverman's crowning and lasting achievement: As a product of the unity of mental and manual work, Labor and Monopoly Capital proclaimed itself against the very tendencies it so persuasively de- scribed.

Geertz's Ambiguous Legacy

Original review, CS 4:6 (November 1975), by Elizabeth Colson:

His anthropology is an art, not a science. To a very large extent therefore his work does not provide a model for other anthro- pologists or sociologists of lesser talent to follow, since he proceeds from an intui- tive grasp of what is important and reaches his conclusion with a flourish that con- ceals the tedium of the procedures.

Well before The Interpretation of Cultures (hereafter, TIC) was published, Clifford Geertz had already changed the way we study culture. Indeed, the heart of TIC is a collection of beautiful essays, published between 1957 and the mid- 1960s, that provided a new theoretical vocabulary for studying culture and a new understanding of what that enterprise involves.

First, Geertz clarified the object of cultural study: not hidden subjectivities or whole ways of life, but publicly available symbols (Keesing 1957). Second, Geertz developed a rich theoretical language for analyzing cul- ture. Beginning with the 1967 "Ethos, World

ANN SWIDLER University of California, Berkeley

The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Es- says, by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books [1973] 1993. $20.00 paper. ISBN: 0-465-09719-7.

View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols," and culminating in 1966 with "Religion as a Cultural System," Geertz asked how particu- lar symbols become real for particular groups. (The very different ways symbolic realities become real and the different kinds of realities they create has been a continuing preoccupation, in "Ideology as a Cultural System" and the later "Art as a Cultural System" and "Common Sense as a Cultural System" [collected in Geertz 1983]). Geertz's answer is that "sacred symbols," and espe- cially ritual actions, generate an "ethos"-an emotional tone, a set of feelings, "moods and motivations"-that simultaneously make the religious worldview seem true and make the ethos seem "uniquely realistic" given that kind of a world. This theoretical formulation seems to explain how symbols, or meanings embodied and enacted in symbols, generate

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300 CONTEMPORARYSOCIOLOGY

experiential realities that in turn make the symbols real. This is how "man" can be "suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" (p. 5 [all page numbers from TIC]).

Other important essays in TIC dealt with such issues as the incompleteness of "human nature" without culture to organize action and experience ("The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man"), different conceptions of the continuity of human personality in different cultures ("Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali"), the resurgence of ethnic particularisms in the new nations ("The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sen- timents and Civil Politics in the New States"), and the problem of when and why ritual practices break down or fail ("Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example").

Despite the theoretical and conceptual advances of these earlier essays, the greatest impact of TIC came from the two essays that bracketed them-the introductory essay, "Thick Description," and the concluding essay, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Whatever their generalizing the- oretical impulse, the earlier essays now marched under the banner of "interpreta- tion," as contrasted with "explanation." The polemical title suggested a rejection of general theorizing about culture and a rejection even of broad comparative claims about why cultures differ. Geertz argued that "culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or pro- cesses can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly-that is thickly-described" (p. 14). The analysis of culture is "not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning" (p. 5).

The enormously influential essay "Deep Play" became a new paradigm for how to study culture: Focus on a single event, symbol, or ritual, such as the cockfight, and "thickly" describe it in the context of all the other symbols, social arrangements, sensibil- ities, and concepts in terms of which it has "meaning." This demonstration of a new kind of practice in cultural study sent a tidal wave across the disciplines by showing how to take a piece of culture-a ritual, a tall tale, a performance, a symbol, or an event-and treat it as a "text." By placing the text in a context of all the other meanings, experi-

ences, practices, or ideas that shed light upon its meanings, the interpreters of a text could find a way to explicate the sensibility of other times and places, the meanings that orga- nized popular culture, or the conceptual structures that lay behind great literary works. Liberated from the rigors of explana- tion and able to take as a focal text any piece of the social world, great or small, historians (Robert Darnton, Natalie Davis, Lynn Hunt, and many others), literary critics (Stephen Greenblatt), and even policy analysts (Con- stance Perrin) were freed to put culture center-stage.

We may see some of the strengths and weaknesses of the interpretive/textual ap- proach by seeing what TIC liberated scholars from. For anthropologists, a Geertzian ap- proach meant liberation, first, from standard, comprehensive ethnography. Second, the Geertzian focus on culture as important in itself provided a way out of the battle among reductionist theories. Rather than having to explain why matrilocal or patrilateral socie- ties produced one kind of birth ritual or another, or why myths had a particular structure, or what function some practice served, anthropologists could focus on a set of symbols, practices, or rituals, and their meaning. The detailed description of kinship structure, myths, or rituals could be jetti- soned, or, rather, these could be reintro- duced in much less systematic ways as part of the interpretation-the thick description-of particular "texts."

In literary criticism, which had always studied texts, and which indeed provided the model for the kind of "semiotic" analysis Geertz was advocating, Geertz ironically showed the value of putting texts back into their social and historical "contexts." But it radically redefined what that context might be. Rather than locating a great work in the major intellectual currents of its day, seeing it as a vehicle for the expression of interests, ideas, or literary influences, Geertz's method allowed a text to be related to whatever other particular texts seemed to illuminate it. So even obscure folk culture can reveal the "semiotic structure" of a culture and thus shed light on underlying structures in a literary text. And any text-the most engag- ing, exotic or ordinary, high or low, obscure or well known-can be the entry point for

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CONTEMPORARYSOCIOLOGY 301

understanding the meanings that animate a cultural system.

In history, first and foremost, Geertz's work legitimated taking seriously popular culture, the culture of subordinated groups, and the symbols and discourse even of major political events. Historians were also freed from focusing on events, or on such hard realities as birth rates, marriage patterns, or material life. The ability to focus on particu- lar, even obscure texts, and then to ask what they revealed about the larger complex of meanings within a society, meant that histo- rians could focus not only on popular rituals, but also on little-known, unusual, or even bizarre events, examining them for what they reveal about deeper cultural patterns in a society. The loosening of the strictures on how central, how repeated, or how institu- tionalized a practice needs to be to serve as a text allowed a historian like Natalie Zemon Davis to move from studying well-institution- alized ritual practices like charivari to studying the single episode of the disappear- ance and "return" of Martin Guerre. Robert Darnton moved from studying the influence of popular belief and practice on major social transformations (the influence of mesmerism on Enlightenment thought, or the influence of book censorship on French political thought) to using particular engaging, but often atypical, events or stories as texts that reveal the whole structure of meanings available in a historical era.

Geertz's revolution has also met substantial resistance. In anthropology there is by now an enormous critical literature (see Shank- man 1984; Asad 1983; Biersack 1989; Parker 1985; Wikan 1991). Some argue that interpre- tation is insufficient, that Geertz provides no criteria for an adequate interpretation, and that interpretation is substantively inferior to explanation. Geertz has also been attacked for exoticizing the peoples he studies, making them seem foreign and incomprehen- sible so that their texts require elaborate "interpretation." And he has been taken to task for neglecting or actively obscuring power, domination, conflict, historical change, and the colonial context of the societies he studies. He has also had to face the increasing resistance in anthropology by "natives" to being "translated" at all, their insistence that indigenous understandings are privileged.

These are not, however, quite the issues

that have been (or necessarily should be) of greatest concern to sociologists. Rather, sociologists can benefit from a critical assim- ilation of Geertz at his best. We certainly need a better understanding of the status of "interpretation" as an enterprise and of the relation between interpretation and explana- tion (see Swidler and Jepperson 1994). We also need to confront a question Geertz and his imitators ignore: What about the selection of texts? Is every text equally important? Or is there some implicit claim analysts make in choosing a text-perhaps simply that that text was indeed meaningful to a particular group of persons in a particular time and place? What about "contradictions" among texts? Geertz's implicit assumption of a unified semiotic system appears plausible as long as the analysis focuses on a single text and arrays other meanings around it; but the assumption breaks down if groups participate in multiple practices that have varying underlying meaning systems.

Where does the interpretive enterprise lead by itself? If we only want to "translate" from another culture to our own, what makes any particular instance of translation of more general interest (Alexander 1987)? Geertz's forays into other cultures certainly are of broader interest, and not, I think, primarily because we are eager to understand the particular meanings that animate Javanese, Balinese, or Moroccan life. Rather, Geertz's analyses are important because they develop an important set of new concepts, and even some theories and explanations, that have not been as fully exploited as they could be.

We might begin by returning to Geertz's analysis of the interaction of ethos, world- view, and ritual experience. The question of how different orders of reality intersect, and how different kinds of Realities become true (or remain more or less provisionally true) under differing circumstances, seems one of the most critical a serious sociology of culture might address.

Second, sociologists might follow up Geertz's interest (in "Internal Conversion in Contemporary Bali" and, later, in Islam Observed 1968) in how societies deal cultur- ally with the challenges of modernity. Geertz builds on a basically Weberian understanding of rationalization, but he sees it as an enormously complex, self-contradictory, sometimes paradoxical process.

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302 CONTEMPORARYSOCIOLOGY

Third, students of culture would also do well to take the notion of "deep play" (a theoretical idea, if ever there was one) more seriously. In "Deep Play," Geertz is not only exploring the meanings of the Balinese cockfight. He is also asking what makes some cultural performances, some cultural experi- ences deeper, more intense, more gripping than others. This is the beginning of an analysis of why some rituals, texts, or symbols generate more meaning than others do. Geertz explores how tension, uncertainty about the outcome, balanced opponents, and the ability to symbolize (and sublimate) significant social tensions make some cock- fights deeper, more exciting, and more satisfying than others.

Barely breaking the surface of Geertz's essays, but there, nonetheless, lurks the question of whether and in what sense cultures are really "systems" after all. He recognizes that multiple kinds of realities can abide side by side. He also occasionally addresses great clashes of meanings, when people's cultural assumptions don't mesh, and when culture itself is a source of sometimes violent conflict. If cultural coher- ence is itself variable, Geertz's work provides a starting point for studying this variation.

Geertz's polemical stands-in favor of interpretation and against explanation, for description over theory, and against all general theory-are red herrings. They have distracted us from the depth and originality of his own theorizing. Sociology has not faced a crisis of confidence like that of

anthropology; and sociology has always had a stronger commitment to both theory and explanation. Perhaps, then, sociologists will be able uninhibitedly to assimilate and find real nourishment in the rich filling of Geertz's interpretation-sandwich.

Other works cited:

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1987. Twenty Lectures: Sociolog- ical Theory since World War II. New York: Columbia University Press.

Asad, Talal. 1983. "Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz." Man 18:237-259.

Biersack, Aletta. 1989. "Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond." Pp. 72-96 in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1968. Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Keesing, Roger M. 1974. "Theories of Culture." Pp. 73-97 in Annual Review of Anthropology 3. Palo Alto: Annual Reviews, Inc.

Parker, Richard. 1985. "From Symbolism to Interpre- tation: Reflections on the Work of Clifford Geertz." Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 10(3):62- 67.

Shankman, Paul. 1984. "The Thick and the Thin: On the Interpretive Theoretical Program of Clifford Geertz." CurrentAnthropology 25 (June):261-279.

Swidler, Ann and Roland L. Jepperson. 1994. "Inter- pretation, Explanation, and Theories of Meaning." Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings, Los Angeles, CA (August).

Wikan, Unni. 1992. "Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance." American Ethnologist 19 (August): 460-482.

A Different Poststructuralism

CRAIG CALHOUN

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Original review, CS 9:2 (March 1980), by Arthur W. Frank III:

The contribution of Bourdieu's work is that in producing a better grounded structural- ism, he accomplishes the practice of a more scientific Marxism ... The European idiom of Bourdieu's writing should not distract North American sociologists from its extraor- dinary importance as a theory of method.

Outline of a Theory of Practice, by Pierre Bourdieu. Trans. by Richard Nice. New York: Cambridge University Press [1972] 1977. 248 pp. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 0-521-29164-X.

Pierre Bourdieu (1988) has described one central motivation behind his intellectual work as a determination to challenge mislead- ing dichotomies. This determination is no-

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Article Contentsp. 299p. 300p. 301p. 302

Issue Table of ContentsContemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, Vol. 25, No. 3 (May, 1996) pp. i-ix+293-440Front Matter [pp. ]Erratum: Featured Essays [pp. vii]Erratum: Book Review [pp. vii]From the Editor's Desk [pp. ix]Featured EssaysTen Most Influential Books of the Past 25 YearsHow to Become a Dominant American Social Scientist: The Case of Theda Skocpol [pp. 293-295]A Classic of Its Time [pp. 296-299]Geertz's Ambiguous Legacy [pp. 299-302]A Different Poststructuralism [pp. 302-305]The Gendering of Social Theory: Sociology and Its Discontents [pp. 305-309]What's Race Got To Do With It? [pp. 309-313]Empire and Knowledge: More Troubles, New Opportunities for Sociology [pp. 313-316]Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Middle-Range Research Strategy [pp. 316-319]Prometheus Rebounds [pp. 319-322]Women's Bodies and Feminist Subversions [pp. 322-325]

Sociological Visions and RevisionsReview: untitled [pp. 325-328]Review: untitled [pp. 328-331]Review: untitled [pp. 331-333]

ReviewsSocial HierarchiesReview: untitled [pp. 334-335]Review: untitled [pp. 335-336]Review: untitled [pp. 336-337]Review: untitled [pp. 337-339]Review: untitled [pp. 339-340]Review: untitled [pp. 340-341]Review: untitled [pp. 341-342]Review: untitled [pp. 342-344]Review: untitled [pp. 344-345]

Political Processes and InstitutionsReview: untitled [pp. 345-347]Review: untitled [pp. 347-348]Review: untitled [pp. 349-350]Review: untitled [pp. 350-351]Review: untitled [pp. 351-352]Review: untitled [pp. 352-353]Review: untitled [pp. 353-354]Review: untitled [pp. 354-356]Review: untitled [pp. 356-357]Review: untitled [pp. 357-358]

MacrosociologiesReview: untitled [pp. 358-359]Review: untitled [pp. 359-360]Review: untitled [pp. 361-362]Review: untitled [pp. 362-365]Review: untitled [pp. 365-368]Review: untitled [pp. 368-370]Review: untitled [pp. 370-371]Review: untitled [pp. 371-372]

Urban Sociology and Community StudiesReview: untitled [pp. 372-374]Review: untitled [pp. 374-375]Review: untitled [pp. 375-376]

Life Course: Stages and InstitutionsReview: untitled [pp. 376-378]Review: untitled [pp. 378-380]Review: untitled [pp. 380-381]Review: untitled [pp. 381-382]Review: untitled [pp. 382-383]

Criminology, Deviance, LawReview: untitled [pp. 384-385]Review: untitled [pp. 385]Review: untitled [pp. 385-386]Review: untitled [pp. 386-388]Review: untitled [pp. 388-389]Review: untitled [pp. 389-390]Review: untitled [pp. 390]

Organizations, Occupations, and MarketsReview: untitled [pp. 391-392]Review: untitled [pp. 392-394]Review: untitled [pp. 394-395]Review: untitled [pp. 395-396]Review: untitled [pp. 396-397]Review: untitled [pp. 397-398]

MicrosociologiesReview: untitled [pp. 398-400]Review: untitled [pp. 400-401]Review: untitled [pp. 401-402]Review: untitled [pp. 402-403]

Sociology of CultureReview: untitled [pp. 403-406]Review: untitled [pp. 406-407]Review: untitled [pp. 408-409]Review: untitled [pp. 409-410]Review: untitled [pp. 410-411]Review: untitled [pp. 411-412]Review: untitled [pp. 412-413]Review: untitled [pp. 413-414]Review: untitled [pp. 414-415]Review: untitled [pp. 415-416]

Medical SociologyReview: untitled [pp. 416-418]Review: untitled [pp. 418-419]Review: untitled [pp. 419-420]Review: untitled [pp. 420-421]Review: untitled [pp. 421-422]Review: untitled [pp. 422-423]

Theory and MethodsReview: untitled [pp. 423-424]Review: untitled [pp. 425-427]Review: untitled [pp. 427-428]Review: untitled [pp. 428-430]Review: untitled [pp. 430-431]

Teaching, Research, and Reference MaterialsReview: untitled [pp. 431-432]

Commentary [pp. 433-434]Publications Received [pp. 435-439]Back Matter [pp. ]