Hermeneutics overview

“There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? ‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.’”

— Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures.

FACULTY OF ARTS | FOAR701

FOAR701: Research paradigms (2016)

Hermeneutics: overview

Greg DowneyDepartment of AnthropologyFaculty of ArtsMacquarie [email protected]: @gregdowney1

mailto:[email protected]

‘social or cultural constructivism’*

* more on this in the week on interactionism…


Hermeneutics culture as symbolic construct


hermeneutics


Culture as ‘text’ But NOT an integrated

whole.FACULTY OF ARTS | FOAR701

“Meaningfulness fundamentally grows out of a relation of part to whole that is grounded in the nature of living experience.”

— Wilhelm Dilthey.


The hermeneutic circle


Part

Whole

Interpretation

Contextualisation

“Meaning is not subjective; it is not projection of thought or thinking onto the object; it is a perception of a real relationship within a nexus prior to the subject-object separation in thought.”

— Wilhelm Dilthey.


Contextualisation** key difference to psychodynamics & structuralism…


“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”

— Clifford Geertz


‘Great Cat Massacre’

The starting point is the gap between contemporaries’

experience (hilarity) & modern response (revulsion).

Robert Darnton: noticing the gap in understanding is first

step in interpretation.


‘Great Cat Massacre’

• The shifting conditions of journeymen: hereditary masters, cheap ‘for hire’ labour, volatile employment (1 year = ancien).

• Concentration of printing industry & emergence of class divide (pre-industrial).

• Carnivalesque Faire le chat as folk festival, featuring cat torture & burning.

• Symbolic significance of cat: sex, cuckoldry, witchcraft.FACULTY OF ARTS | FOAR701

Darnton on the cat massacre• The workers’ activities (hunt,

trial, executions) were symbolic theatre.

• The meanings were not even available to the bourgeois.

• Merged popular expressive forms: charivari, witch burning, defensive maiming, mock sabbath, fête of Saint John the Baptist…

• Popular act scrutinised like literary work.


Clifford Geertz, hermeneutical analysis of the

Balinese cockfight.Symbolic anthropology


Clifford Geertz and ‘symbolic anthropology’• Symbols are not merely mental

but public and shared. • Transmit meaning by links to

other symbols (model is language).

• Key to approach the ‘native’s point of view’ (‘emic’ perspective, v. etic).Symbols are gateway to worldview.

• Explicitly rejects functionalism (unlike some symbolic research).


Deep Play: Notes on Geertz

Cock as polysemous symbol: masculinity, sexuality,

animality, status, demonic, group identity.

Cockfight is a cultural form through which the Balinese

reflect on themselves.


Geertz on the Balinese cockfight• Emphasises that, although a

‘status bloodbath,’ no one’s status can really change (except addicts’).

• Behaviour in fight shows what is at stake (esp. gambling).Geertz’s modelling here is almost rational choice.

• ‘Deep play’: stakes too high to be rational.

• High stakes are an imposition of meaning on life.



Geertz on interpreting the Balinese cockfight

‘… the Balinese peasants themselves are quite aware of all this and can, at least to an ethnographer, do state most of it in approximately the same terms as I have. Fighting cocks, almost every Balinese I have ever discussed the subject with has said, is like playing with fire only not getting burned.’

— Clifford Geertz, in ‘Deep Play’ (2005: 77)



‘An image, fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them (though, in its play-with-fire way, it does a bit of both), but, in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them.’




‘Its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves.’



Symbols as polysemous

• Multiple significances.• Incompleteness: necessity

of interpretation.• Victor Turner: exegetical,

operational & positional meanings stretching from normative to sensory.

• Myth & ritual crucial to understanding.


Dominant or ‘axiomatic’ symbols (V. Turner)

• Combine three properties:• Condensation of multiple

meanings and referrants,• Unification of disparate

significata, and • Polarisation of meaning.(Freudian symbolic theory still

influential within hermeneutics.)


Rapid overview

symptom is private symbols are public

interpretation requires

uncovering past trauma

interpretation requires

following links in play


Rapid overview

subject is unconscious

subject can volunteer

interpretationsignificance is

ultimately idiosyncratic &

specific

symbol is polysemic &

shared


“The culture of people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong. There are enormous difficulties in such an enterprise, methodological pitfalls to make a Freudian quake, and some moral perplexities as well….”

— Clifford Geertz, in ‘Deep Play’ (2005: 86).


goal? empathy based on situating activity or

expression in context.

“… But to regard such forms as ‘saying something of something,’ and saying it to somebody, is at least to open up the possibility of an analysis which attends to their substance rather than to reductive formulas professing to account for them.”

— Clifford Geertz, in ‘Deep Play’ (2005: 86).


‘Thick Description’

From philosopher Gilbert Ryle, developed by Geertz.

Description requires an understanding of the context

in which a practice, act or symbol is meaningful.


Philosophical roots: the ‘hermeneutic

turn’Very brief review…


Martin Heidegger• In Sein und Zeit (1927),

Heidegger rejects Cartesian attempt to build solid foundation for knowledge in consciousness.

• The subject is Dasein, ‘being there’: determined by world.

• Our relationship to the world is through ‘understanding’ in immediate, practical sense (no objective knowledge).

• Hermeneutic circle: experience of all meaning from projection.FACULTY OF ARTS | FOAR701

Interpretation is not “the acquiring of information about what is understood; it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding.”

— Martin Heidegger, in Being and Nothingness (1962 trans.).


Hans-Georg Gadamer

Bildung or ‘education in culture’Fusion of Horizons: the

hermeneutic circle is really the coming together of two interpretive ‘horizons.’

True understanding changes reader.

No ‘objectivity,’ only openness to world.


“Being that can be understood is language..”

— Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method (1960).


Key components of hermeneutic paradigm• The act of interpretation is both methodological and

ontological.• Interpretive method eclectic and often relies on individual

insight (as well as drawing fairly promiscuously from other paradigms).

• Symbolic or interpretive analysis invariably draws in context (contrasts with structuralism and cognitive approaches).

• Goal is understanding not explanation (empathy v. causation).• The use of misunderstanding, incomprehensibility and even

shock as a tool for exposing one’s own symbolic ‘prejudices.’


Core of hermeneutic theory• Epistemology: Cultural and symbolic resources are public,

although interpretations are individual acts so they can be peculiar.Knowing is not a challenge, but reaching the bottom of knowing – objectivity – impossible as meaning always changing (inc. due to inquiry).

• Ontology: In its most extreme form, hermeneutic claim that the method mirrors the nature of being itself (Dasein). ‘To be’ is ‘to interpret.’

• Methodology: Interpretive approach based on the hermeneutic circle and ‘thick description.’


“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.”

— Clifford Geertz


Strengths of hermeneutic paradigm• Radically relativist (in some forms, e.g. Gadamer) so it

builds a moral mission for understanding as bridging human divides.

• Grapples with cultural variation better than any other perspective we’ve had to this point. (Doesn’t pathologise difference or suffer from ethnocentrism.)

• Also highlights competing voices and interpretations.• Takes seriously subjects’ own capacity to know their

worlds (not a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’). • Puts an emphasis on the quality of writing and

exposition (clearly seen in Geertz’s article). Rather than aping natural sciences & striving for false ‘objectivity.’FACULTY OF ARTS | FOAR701

Prominent strains of hermeneutic thought• Modern philosophical hermeneutics: Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich

Schleiermacher

• Symbolic anthropology & sociology: Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner (mixed with structural functionalism), Mary Douglas, David Schneider (anthropology); Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Jeffrey Alexander (sociology).

• Ontological hermeneutics: Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty, John McDowell, Karl-Otto Apel.

• Marxist hermeneutics: Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson.

• Poststructuralism: As you’ll see, hermeneutics exerts a strong influence over a number of poststructuralist thinkers. (Postmodern focus on ‘positioning’ of the interpreter is consistent with hermeneutic thought.)

• Strong streams in law, Ancient History, literature, history, religious studies, political philosophy, social studies of science, even architecture.


Criticism of hermeneutic approach• Ultimately, makes analysis a descriptive exercise;

does not lend itself to general theoretical or predictive formulations.

• Unfalsifiable interpretive exercise (similar to psychoanalysis).Are all potential interpretations really in play?

• Seems to rely heavily on individual insightfulness of the analyst rather than offering systematic tool.Even Geertz says: ‘guessing at meanings’ and then assessing guesses.

• How is ‘context’ ever delimited in any meaningful way?

• Been criticised as anti-materialist and ignoring inequality by other perspectives (Marxist, post-structuralist, scientific).


Criticism of hermeneutic approach• Creates unbridgeable gap between humanity

and science, places social sciences on an ‘arts’ foundation.

• What happens when your subjects insist something is ‘meaningless’ or offer an interpretation you suspect is, well, wrong? (resolving the emic/etic conflict)

• Odd when treating culture as ‘text’ undermines actual ability to evaluate and critique texts (because they can only be understood or evaluated in context).

• Problem of the relationship between language and the non-linguistic (action, for example).


Thanks for your attention!

Bibliography online at iLearnPhotos public domain at Pixabay or as indicated.


Additional readings (philosophy)Bruns, Gerald. 1992. Hermeneutics. Ancient and Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1989. Introduction to the Human Sciences. Eds. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1994. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum.Habermas, Jürgen. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” Trans. Joseph Bleicher. Ormiston and Schrift, 245-272. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1998. Hermeneutics and Criticism. Ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Vico, Giambattista. 1984. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.


Additional readings (anthro, soc, STS)Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2003. “The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics (with Philip Smith),” in The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Basso, Keith. 1976. ”’Wise Words’ of the Western Apache: Metaphor and Semantic Theory,” in Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Keith Basso and Henry Selby (Albuquerque,N.M.), pp. 93-122. Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T., 1991. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. (No. 10). Penguin UK.Boland, R. J. (1991). Information system use as a hermeneutic process. In H. E. Nissen, H. K. Klein, & R. Hirschheim, (Eds.). Information systems research: contemporary approaches and emergent traditions (pp. 439-458). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., North Holland Danforth, Loring M. 1982. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press. Daniel, E. Valentine. 1984. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California Press. Dolgin, Janet L., David S. Kemnitzer, and David M. Schneider, eds. 1977. Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings. New York. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Rutledge and Kegan Paul.____. 1970. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books.Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.____. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York, NY: Basic Books.Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Rheingold, H. 1993. The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Sherratt, Yvonne. 2006. Continental philosophy of social science: hermeneutics, genealogy, critical theory. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.


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Hermeneutics overview