Geertz and Postmodernism

The later years

Exploring Religions and Cultures Dr Àngels Trias i Valls & Roula P 2009

Clifford Geertz•• Clifford GeertzClifford Geertz was born in 1926 (almost twenty years

younger than Levi-Strauss and twenty five years younger than Evans-Pritchard), a representative of a new generation of anthropologists…

• He studied English (that may justify his later view that culture is a kind of text) and philosophy and then participated on some social research programs on development in Indonesia.

• His monographs include: The Religion of Java (1960), Agricultural Involution (1963)), Paddlers and Princes (1963), The social History of an Indonesian Town (1965)).

• This high rate of academic productivity, helped him gain wider recognition, and became professor at Chicago. Later, Geertz, moved to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton.

The change in perspective

• Geertz managed to escape from the limitations which constrained the previous generations of anthropologists. He did fieldwork in the postcolonial era: there were no isolated communities left, no simple structures to be identified, no easily manifested functions…

Thick description • Good ethnographic description is not mere

description. It can be a very powerful text full of meanings: too many meanings one may say. As Clifford Geertz argues, ethnographic description can be “extraordinarily ‘thick’”…

• This expression: ‘a thick description’ is among the most widely quoted expressions in anthropology… It is the first part of the title of an essay by Clifford Geertz, called ‘Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture’.

An example

• Geertz borrows the concept of ‘thick description’ by Gilbert Ryle, along with a very simple example: the differentiation between a ‘twitch’ and a ‘wink’. Two boys may rapidly contracting their eyelids. In the first case the contraction may be just involuntary. In the second case the contraction may signify a conspiratorial message: ‘come on lets steal the ice- cream from the third boy in front of us’…

A web of meanings• As Geertz observes there is a vast difference

between a twitch and wink. There is a difference, which involves meaning, social codes, special interpretations. Culture includes many meanings and meanings ask for interpretations. Geertz’s understanding of culture reflects a semiotic approach: Culture is made up of webs of meaning, webs of significance. Meaning and significance created by people. The job of the anthropologist, the culture-analyst is to interpret this meaning…

Culture is context

• Culture for Geertz, is not a reified entity, like Durkheim’s conception of society: “culture is not a power”, he says, “not something to which social events… or processes can be causally attributed”; “culture is a context”, a context “within which” actions and events and processes “can be intelligibly, ‘thickly’ described”.

Culture is like text• Understanding culture is like reading a book,

Geertz said, (and a foreign culture is like a book in a foreign language!).

• Culture is like an ‘acted document’: people act and action creates meaning. Human action has significance. The anthropologist will try to read and understand, and since, meanings are superimposed on other meanings, the anthropologists will try to interpret and understand as much as possible… make the thickest description possible…

Incomplete interpretations• Because ethnography is about ‘making sense of

meanings’, the anthropologist’s interpretation does not reveal absolute truths. The anthropologist’s understanding may be deep or more sallow… The success of an interpretation is a matter of degree not a matter of absolute representation… It is a matter of distinguishing “winks from twitches, real winks from mimicked ones”.

• “Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete”, argues Geertz, “the more deeply it goes the less complete it is”… (:29)

Contributions• With ideas like these Geertz delivered blows to

the old positivist perceptions on practicing anthropology. He opened the way for reflexivity.

• Reflexivity relates to the consciousness of the researcher of his or her role in the research process.

• Geertz opened the way for a more honest anthropological self-portrayal. Some of his students peaked up those ideas and developed what later became postmodern anthropology.

Multiple interpretations• ‘The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts’,

Geertz repeats, ‘which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those whom they properly belong’.

• with ideas like these we get a better appreciation of the interpretative abilities of the agents of a culture [the people we study]. It is not just the anthropologist who understands some people. The people have their own understanding of meaning in their culture. The anthropologist uses their understanding in his/her interpretive task to read their culture.

Analysis is like reading• This is why ethnographic analysis is very similar

to trying to understand a literary document and the anthropologist is like a literary critic. What the anthropologist reads, is already an interpretation of a kind. It is the interpretation of the people the anthropologist studies.

• With the work of Geertz anthropologists get a better understanding of multiplicity. Many possible meanings are available in an ethnographic setting. Many interpretations are there. The anthropologist’s interpretation is just one among many others and not necessarily THE one.

Criticisms• Geertz does not really do what he promises to do: He

does not allow us to see this multiplicity of interpretation in his own ethnographic accounts: the reader does not get the opportunity to read the different points of view and make his or her own interpretation. Geertz’s powerful writing dominates the interpretive efforts of his readers. His understanding, as thick as it is, powerfully makes the reader agree. It does not always make the reader think…

• ‘Geertz’s style’, argues Jonathan Spencer, ‘presupposes a passive reader’… [and that is exactly the opposite of what Geertz was trying to achieve]

Geertz and postmodernism

• Geertz’s emphasis on text and the text-like characteristics of culture, sound like postmodernism. Postmodern anthropology was developed immediately after the publication of Geertz’s The interpretation of cultures. In fact, most postmodern anthropologists recognize him as their intellectual predecessor, a kind of ‘father- figure’.

The differences between Geertz and postmodernism

• 1.Geertz still sees anthropology as a kind of science

• 2. Several postmodernists (Clifford, Crapanzano) argue that his interpretation is too authoritative. It is after all, as Geertz’s own argument demonstrates, Geertz’s interpretation. His native informants are excluded from it.

Anti-anti-relativism• Geertz is standing half-way between the old

fashioned emphasis on objectivity and the new victory of relativism.

• Those who believe in absolute truths hate him, but the postmodernists think he is too conservative. He still has confidence in objectivity.

• He calls himself an anti-anti-relativist: that means that he does not think of himself as a relativist, but thinks that naïve anti-relativists are more dangerous than relativists.

Emphasis on the symbolic

• The work of Geertz brought a new emphasis on the symbolic aspects of culture. His emphasis was not on the symbols themselves, neither on the practical operations (or functions) of symbols. His emphasis was on the ways symbols affect our understand of the world, on how symbols carry with them what we call culture… on how social actors think of what is going on (Ortner 1984: 129).

Prioritising native interpretation

• To this development was associated another one, also introduced by Geertz: the new significance attributed into studying anthropology ‘from the actor’s point of view’. If an anthropologist aspires to understand some other peoples’ culture, she or he must start his or her interpretation from the position in which native meanings were constructed (Ortner 1984: 130).

Inspiring others

• Geertz did not develop a theory of practice or action but inspired other anthropologists who did. In the eighties anthropology became more concerned with what people do and how people think. Before that, anthropology was focused on social roles and social meanings. In the eighties anthropologists started examining how people fit to those roles and how they related to those meanings.

The later years

• We see, therefore, that the eighties were a period of change in anthropology. The emergence of the new postmodern or experimental anthropology was the development with the greatest impact: it was the cause for much disagreement, discord and contention, as much as, the opportunity for productive debate and theoretical refinement.

Some basic rules

• Postmodernism can be seen by many as the final blow on old-fashioned positivism.

• Postmodernists declared science dead • Science, postmodernists argue, is

associated with unequal power relations and the claim of some people to know better than others.

Authorship

• Postmodernism’s major criticism on pre- postmodern anthropology relates to the issue of authorship. Postmodernists challenged the authority of the anthropologist as the ultimate author of other peoples’ lives. Who grants the anthropologist the authority to know better than the Nuer or the Balinese? How does the anthropologist legitimise her authority as an interpreter or an analyst?

Polyvocal (with many voices) texts

• Postmodernists prefer to hear more voices, than just one voice (the voice of the anthropologist). They try thus to produce polyvocal texts: texts that allow more than one authors to speak.

• This is why typical postmodern ethnographies contain dialogues, (the ethnographer converses with the informants,) or long life histories, in which the informants talk about their lives in the way they want to relate the facts. The final result is a book with many authors: the informants, ideally, have an equal claim to authorship as the anthropological author.

Ethnography is fiction• Postmodernists took Geertz’s metaphor that

ethnography looks like a text or book with meaning very literally. They treat all ethnographic writing as ‘fiction’: all ethnographic writing, they believe, is artificial. So they engage in the task of analysing ethnographic text according to the rules of literary criticism.

• They also go one step further and experiment with their ethnographic writing producing all sorts of possible combinations: dialogues and indirect commentary and life-histories and some theory all in one blend

The value of the subjective

• Instead of a complete or absolute interpretation of social life, postmodernists favour fragmentation and subjectivity. Their ethnographic description does not have to be complete or accurate in the sense of generality. Particular subjective reflections are treated as more real than sociological constructions.

Multiple authorship• Since, the postmodern anthropological text is multivocal,

we get to know more of the anthropologists as well. In traditional anthropology the author tries to stay out of the scene, directing the plot and the organisation of the material. It is like a film in which the film director would always remain behind the camera. When the director stays behind the camera, the audience does not know much about him or her or the reasons that affected his or her choices in the film.

• In postmodern ethnographies the anthropological author is just one of the authors who participate in the plot. It is like a film in which the film-director discusses with the actors in front of the camera. In this case the film-director is just one protagonist among many others, and we can understand more about his or her motivation and his or her particular choices.

Reflexivity

• Postmodern anthropologists think that it is more democratic to talk about themselves in the ethnography. In this way, they argue, the reader can make his or her own judgement on the criteria that affected the choices and interpretations of the author.

• Some polemics of postmodernism, however, get very irritated by this practice. They accuse the postmodernists of being self-preoccupied.

Criticisms

• Postmodern anthropologists say that old fashioned, monological representation is arrogant. But what about all this new jargon introduced by postmodernists? New terms like polyvocality, dialogical ethnography, hermeneutics, deconstruction are presented as new technicalities that separate the researcher from the informant and provide more opportunities for arrogance and distinctions.

Criticisms• Postmodernists claim that their ethnographies

present the ‘native’s point of view’. They are not the only ones. This ambitious plan of capturing native meaning and allowing native voices to be heard, started as early as Malinowski’s time and was supported by the great majority of anthropologists after him. In other words, the postmodernist claim that anthropology didn’t fully allowed native voices to be heard is not true. There are hundreds of good ethnographies which beautifully portray the native point of view and are not postmodern.

Criticisms

• Postmodernists have criticised severely the claim of other anthropologist to represent in an authoritative way other cultures. But a careful critic will discover that even them are not innocent of authoritarian writing. Despite their effort to include many voices and protagonists in their text, postmodern anthropologists, at the end of the day, make their own decisions about what will be in the text and what will be left outside.

The feminist critique

• Feminist anthropologists accuse the postmodernists of stealing many ideas from them without fully acknowledging this intellectual debt. Feminist anthropologists were the first to acknowledge difference, agency and subjectivity. The postmodernists used those concepts without giving any merit to the feminist authors and without including female authors in their all male publications!

Overall….• The debate between postmodernists and the

polemics of postmodernism is still on and it is difficult to say who is right at this point.

• Postmodern anthropology has certainly something interesting to say about the world we live in. It critically reflect on who represents whom, who controls whom. It introduces new styles of more creative writing in anthropology.

• Postmodernism has a rejuvenating influence on anthropology. It was rejuvenating for both its critics and its supporters, and therefore deserves some respect.