Customer Reviews

The Interpretation Of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs..."

These cultural "webs of significance" Clifford Geertz speaks of are constructed of religious beliefs and practices, cultural customs, social interactions, attitudes and behavior -- everything around us that we have constructed as rational beings capable of thought and imagination. According to Geertz, the role of the anthropologist is, in a sense, to 'decode' the symbolic meanings of these certain events, practices, customs and interactions that take place within a specific culture, however insignificant they may seem to the observer. Detail is of utmost importance. An anthropologist must become part of the culture -- looking in from the outside he will understand nothing. Of course, in order to reduce the occurrence of the anthropologist's own cultural bias and to attempt to more accurately understand a culture, one could easily say that it is imperative that anthropologists emerge themselves in the customs and practices of that culture. But, even then, is it ever possible for one to grasp an understanding of a culture in which one was not born into? Are humans socialized from birth to perceive all cultural customs and practices through a shady lens, clouded by perceptions of the world they have acquired during childhood?

Geertz believes that, while to some extent it is possible to reach an understanding of a culture outside of our own, it is important to understand that anthropological writing is merely a "thick description," an interpretation of an interpretation. In other words, the anthropologist is interpreting the culture's interpretation of the event that is taking place. There is nothing precise, categorically logical or rational about anthropological writing: Cultural analysis is strictly the process of creating various hypotheses, examining those hypotheses, and then deriving explanations from the best hypotheses. As Geertz says, the analysis of it is not an "experimental science in search of law" but, rather, "an interpretive one in search of meaning." It is the job of an anthropologist to first attempt to understand how an event is interpreted by the culture in which it takes place, then to make an interpretation of that interpretation, and then it is left up to the reader of anthropological writing to interpret the final interpretations. It is difficult, if not impossible, to derive any absolute factual conclusion from data constructed of so many interpretive layers; thus, interpretation is not definitive.

The role of an anthropologist, according to Geertz, is to construct the finest interpretations possible, and most importantly, to be an active participant in the culture, rather than a passive observer.

This book is THE classical text for a modern cultural anthropologist. It's also an excellent book for anyone skeptical of social science in general, and serves as a great introduction for anyone just curious about anthropology.

This remains one of the seminal works in not just Anthropology, but also in the field of social science, written by a brilliant Social Scientist.

When it was first written in 1973, it was not just "leading-edge," but utterly revolutionary. Today however, in the era of full-fledged "cultural and ethnographic relativity," and in the interim, where symbols have earned a more prominent if not wholly respected cross-disciplinary cachet and place in social science scholarship, many of Professor Geertz's seminal ideas now seem strangely "quaint," but have in any case become as much a part of the mainstream as they have become controversial.

For my money, I prefer to judge this brilliant scholarship, on its own merits as well as against the standards of the times in which it emerged. I have yet to read a first chapter in an English book that is as well constructed and as informatively exciting as that in this book. Geertz, in drawing a bright line between what is universal and constant about man -- versus what is local, ever changing, and merely parochial about him -- attempts to answer the question: Just how important are human differences, and especially differences between cultures?

To answer it, the author moves with seamless facility across, between and well beyond the ossified boundaries of "normal" Anthropology, into myriad related and not so related, fields: such as sociology, philosophy, and the philosophy of science, linguistics, psychology and evolutionary biology, among several others. From their intellectual intersection, Geertz builds up a beautiful theory that culture is a system of shared symbols that allows its members to give shape and meaning to their respective experiences. In 1973, making the full connection between the significance of man's ability to weave meaning from webs of symbols and symbolisms, was not fully appreciated by most social scientists, and certainly (and curiously) even less appreciated by most Anthropologists, who arguably were "pulling up the rear" in developing interpretative theories upon which to base their mostly ethnographic practices.

More than anything else, Professor Greetz "changed the game" and arguably brought the field of Anthropology out of the "theoretical backwaters" and "dark ages" into a more updated and respected place in the academic sun. With his philosophy of science and general philosophy bent, he gave the field of Anthropology a new more exciting cachet and a deeper more meaningful theoretical resonance, mandate and motive: If one was to fully understand culture, he had to first be able to unravel, and then decipher the web of intertwined meanings of symbolic actions and interactions: that is to say he had to be able to understand the full meaning of the whole panoply of culturally determined symbols, totems, events, customs, rituals, rites, politics, etc. Even so, there was only a limited amount that an "outsider" could expect to learn, as culture remains mostly an enigmatic "interior" enterprise. At root, studying culture is about trying to formulate a basis upon which groups imagine.

To Geertz, (and this book is full of vivid and penetrating examples), cultural analysis thus reduces to that of sorting out the structures of significance discovered in ethnographic observations. And to him ethnography was about "thick description." (A term he borrowed from Gilbert Rile, but then went on to make famous). "Thick description" is about the nested relationships of interpretations: It is about "the interpretation of interpretation, ... of interpretation," ... ad infinitum.

Most of his critics argued that there was nothing inherently new about this approach. However, the way Geertz proposed to go about it was indeed new: The Anthropologist could no longer remain aloof and stand detached "at a distance" as an innocent observer in the ethnographic experiment. He had to, as it were, "be on the inside looking out," rather than "on the outside looking in." He had to not just "stick his head under the tent," but get inside the "bone marrow" of the culture and become an integral and interactive part of its practices. Doing this, of course raised it's own risks and a host of ancillary problems, which ever since have been the subject of much criticism. The least of these was not suffering the debilitating backlash of what is referred to as the "Heisenberg effect of social measurements." This effect arises whenever one attempts to judge or gauge the meanings of cultural symbolisms by interacting with them. In doing so, one runs the risk of contaminating the very experiment he is attempting to study.

But these concerns aside, Geertz's main contribution was not just in changing the way Anthropology was done, and the effect he had on shaping its theoretical outlook, but he also changed the way cultural habits were viewed, as well as the way theoretical language and concepts were formulated and used to describe them. For once human behavior is seen as symbolic action, questions of whether it is then just patterns of conduct or frames of mind or some mixture of the two, ceases to make sense. One is no longer able to reify culture as for instance, power, or a set of sociological mechanisms, or something from which behavior can be inferred and attributed, but as a context in which "thick description" takes place.

100 stars.

This is a book for scholars but it is very readable and will definitely throw you into what anthropology is (should be?) about. You might have to read through each essay a couple of times to make sure you understood the points he was making, but it's not annoying to do because the points he is making are so excellent.

One of the best book purchases I have ever made.

I purchased this one as it was a part of course requirements at my major. Geertz' effort in the field of anthropology is undeniable. His contributions in understanding symbols of culture and how important interpreting them in the study of culture is, these things were discussed in my class. So for that, all students of Anthropology, especially Cultural/Social should read this one somewhere along their studies. However, it has to be said that the book is a demanding read. His sentence structures are complex, long-winded and hard-to-tackle academic reading. Parts of the book deal with New Nations (born after WW2) which are not that interesting, and which don't seem all that relevant.

Still, Geertz' examples from the cultures of Bali, Trinidad and Indonesia make the book more understandable and all-in-all a good read.

Reading Geertz takes time and attention. Not as much time as he spent recording and relaying his observations, but almost. His writing is dense, but rewarding when one sees the world he builds and describes. This is a fantastic collection of his work. Ultimately, my favorite work is the "Balinese Cockfight."

When I'm reading some complex bit of social science theory, I have to remind myself that no matter what discipline, ANY social science didn't exist 200 years ago- they are recent inventions. It also pays to consider that 99% of the material for ANY social science has been rendered irrelevant by developments that have occurred since the late 1960s. Specifically, the introduction of ideas outside of the "positivist" "social science as hard science" school of thought- larger known as "relativism."
The idea that social sciences were an analogue of natural sciences foundered on the rocks of the complexity of human interaction, and attempts to revise various social sciences have in turn been dashed against the entrenched interests of the older generation of social science mandarins. It's a bit of a sticky wicket, I suppose, but in day-to-day existence it means that you can't count on ANY of the social sciences for ANY insight into human behavior.
It's a sad state of affairs, and I analogize the state of social sciences to the state of the music industry: Rendered largely irrelevant by updates in technology, and not sure what to do about it AND free falling into oblivion in the mean time.
One of the revolutionariness in the shift away from positivism into an arena of "relativism" was Clifford Geertz. Geertz was a trailblazer in the social science of Anthropology, introducing sophisticated ideas about human interaction that had been developed by European philosophers like Wittgenstein, sociologists like Max Scheler and linguists like Saussure into the contemporary american discipline of Anthropology.
Writing mostly in obscure specialty journals until his Interpretation of Cultures was published 1977, Interpretation of Cultures was itself a collection of the articles he had written up that point, interspersed with bridging chapters. I think it's fair to say that the implications of Geertz's arguments vis a vis anthropological theory are still being addressed in the realm of professional scholarship, but I don't think he's really been absorbed into the "general reading public" in the way that he should be.
Unfortunately, Interpretation of Cultures is far from being a good book in and of its own right, and in a sense it contains a symbolic relevance that mirrors Geertz's own discussion about the role of symbols in religion. (now a "sub-field" of Anthropology called "Symbolic Anthropology.") I actually ended up skipping his 100 page discussion of the idea of ideology and it's relationship to the newly emerging nations of the 3d world in the 1960s- but his "thick description" trailblazer "Notes from A Balinese Cock Fight" and his chapters describing the role of symbols in religion seem as fresh today as they were then.
Interpretation of Cultures also contains a spirited anti-relativist tirade against his own predecessors: Ruth Benedicts "Patterns of Cultures" comes in for harsh criticism for being too mushy-mushy about describing the relationships between cultures as well as her description of cultures themselves. Geertz champions the deep, fully descriptive essay at the expense of making universal judgement about the whole of human kind based on observations of one culture.
Maybe this is why these ideas haven't really penetrated into the genpop: They don't provide any facile or easy answers about explaining human behavior, just suggestions on a method for making observations about phrasing the questions.

After reading some of the French classical anthropologists first, I was delighted to read Clifford Geertz, a cultural anthropologist who writes with a readable style and make arguments that are somewhat 'self-contained.' For instance, 'Religion as a Cultural System ..' is a classic of social science: one sentence of related abstractions and generalizations is punctuated by illustrations that define the terms and extend an argument to justify the one-sentence hypothesis. This article changed the way that I understood social science and anthro and is often a model for me whenever I write.


excerpt from book
"Let us, therefore, reduce our paradigm to a definition, for, although it
is notorious that definitions establish nothing in themselves, they do, if
they are carefully enough constructed, provide a useful orientation, or
reorientation of thought, such that an extended unpacking of them can
be an effective way of developing and controlling a novel line of inquiry.
They have the useful virtue of cxplicitness: they commit themselves
in a way discursive prose does not (which in this field, especially, is always
liable to substitute rhetoric for argument). Without further ado,then, a

Religion is:
(1) a system of symbols which acts to
(2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by
(3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and
(4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that
(5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."

When i found his Book - or rather a few of its included essays - it was like if it just had been laying there waiting for me to handle some of the very fundamental puzzlement I've had with the grand theories in social science. I have found use of it in my reflections about the link between micro- and macro elements of society postulated by such giants as George Ritzer and Jeffrey Alexander, as well the classical distinction between the existential and normative character of culture itself - formally defined in Anthony Giddens distinction between signification and legitimation - and, even more important, helping me to understand the analytical dualism of culture and structure made by Margaret Archer. Geertz was far ahead of them all, perhaps due to an enormously rich empirical material - which both enriches the "thick" theories he has as well as function as a pedagogic device to illustrate the points he makes. A must for anyone with an interest in how och why individuals and societys work as they do, regardles of beeing in the discipline of sociology, anthropology or any other field within social scienses.

Besides the great price on the book, they kept me informed as to when my book had shipped and the time-line in which I would be seeing it on my doorstep. Great service. I would buy from them anytime.

In the typical post-modernist sense, Geertz seeks to cast doubt on everything without leaving us with anything in place. Just like other post modernists, his theories are so vague, poorly stated, and in generally strange that they cannot be proved right or wrong. Even if he, like other post-modernists, is right, we do not gain anything but perhaps a somewhat edited understanding of our world.

The field of cultural anthropology in and of itself is a "shady" field. The lack of biological evidence to back up Geertz's claims is immense. To think the Central Nervous System is a result of culture is simply asinine. To think that somehow culture exists out there for us to grab and chose and that it is somehow transferred through our genes and eventually influences evolution is outright ridiculous.

Just because you can make claims and cast doubt on opposing claims does not mean you are correct. There is little evidence to show that the human race is still undergoing evolution in the Darwinian sense. Geertz's failure, or rather deliberate attempt to, distinguish between the mind and the brain shows his general distaste for any sort of reasonable logic.

Please: Someone rescue anthropology from its current blinding veil of post modernist, post-structuralist ideology. Post modernism is like chewing gum that sticks to your shoe sole and impedes you from moving forward. OK, so it has our attention, now let us get it off our feet, move on into the future, and leave this decrepit, inane theory behind us all.